Not convinced, sorry! You get points for trying though.

Thinking about is an ability of minds, just like moving around is an ability of legs. — Daniel

Your problem is that your ontology lacks any kind of conceptual space for the distinction that needs to be made here.

Still, legs have no mind. They are coupled to it, but don't experience mind related stuff. Well, they can hurt or feel a massage, or feel the ground they walk on. Hot soil feels different from cold steel. They need the mind to perform their complex motions. But they are different from it. You can map there motions to brain processes as they need structured processes to perform their motions. Legs can't make their complex motions without a brain attached. And while legs can perform a huge variety of motions, there is no such motion visible in brains. While the legs are performing a wìde variety of motions, the brain stays stationary while on that stationary structure a huge variety of patterned electric pulses can run. The running of these patterns on the static structure can indeed be compared with legs moving in a statìc physical space on which other processes take place with which the legs, or the whole body, can interact. Confining your attention to legs is like confining the brain to motor function of the legs only.

The brain is a secondary organ in service to the body, the body produced the brain, the brain did not produce the body. That said, the physical environment produced the organism/life, and life interprets the physical world through its effects upon the body. We can only know the world through the body. It is the nature of the organism's body that determines its apparent reality, If one is to be at one with one's the context/physical world, one needs to be sensitive to it in ways that sures continued existence/survival.

Consciousness is knowing the world relative to the state of the body. Where there is a somewhat different biological body, there is a different apparent reality, a different consciousness. I personally do not believe that consciousness belongs to the brain/mind as a duality. I believe it is a mistake to think of the organism as anything but a functional organ of the physical world. Consciousness is reaction, cognitive processing is reaction, the understanding is the sum of reactions that form a meaningful concept for the bodily response, where reaction is response to the physical world, part to part, part to the whole and the whole to each of it's parts. In this sense the physical world for the organism is cause and reaction is effect, is consciousness.

Emotions are more primordial than thought but their essence is reaction to the effect of the physical world upon the nature of the body, again producing a response reaction to the bodies changed state. I think it might be helpful to think in terms of compound reaction as consciousness, always with the physical world as cause.

It does seem that emotions are a main aspect in between the brain and sentient experience. If too much emphasis in understanding the nature of consciousness is based on the brain it could leave out the whole role of bodily experience in viewing the mind. There is the whole realm of emotional intelligence rather than just approaching life from the 'head'. The emphasis on mindfulness within psychology is important in this respect, in making the focus not simply about cognitive processes.

Hi Jack,

Emotions I think determine the direction and color of any thought of an experience had. Only an exceptional mind can redirect thought away from the impulse of emotionally governed thought, and pehaps not only question one's thought, but the emotion governing it. As E.A Poe once said, the passions are the elements of life. Basic sounds once expressed the emotions felt about the experiences of the body. With the introduction of language I suspect not only did it mean refinement of both thought and emotion, but it acted as a cattalist for growth of the frontal lobes, until there was a give and take of thought influencing the emotions and the orginanal emotion generating thought. This is where the confusion and/or question comes about, are the mind and the brain identical. The brain I would guess is the hardware along with the rest which is the body, with mind being a bodily function. As it was the environment that produced the organism, its body, the body producing the brain, and thus the brain producing mind/thought and just as it is not possiable to separate subject and object, one cannot separate mind and body.