An Idea About Mind "Mind" is a concept which no longer belongs in philosophical discussions about the nature of biological behavioural and informational organisation. The appropriate context for further developpment is cognitive sciences, which includes a fair bit of philosophy and potential for philosophical inquiry, but which also requires that we review the previous paradigm of Philosophy of Mind and remove from it any abusive reification (which happened to be the major engine for previous attempts at Psychology, which was then just a branch of Philosophy like Ethics or Logic). "Mind" is such a reification.
When you talk about "mind" in a non pop-psychology context, you must be very precise about what you mean. For many philosophers, mind refers only to our internal discourse, which is then imbued with quasi-mystical properties because it is then expected to answer for all the other properties and powers of the 'classical' concept of mind, such as emotivity and will. But of course any amount of research in current cognitive science papers will show that internal discourse can be entirely reduced to subvocalization, which is just another iteration of our brains potential for predictive virtualization. What you hear yourself think is already after the fact, and its one subvocalization selected amongst dozen others which you never 'hear yourself' think. And it doesnt have any 'active cognition' potential, thats probably the most important ; when you hear yourself thinking, you arent thinking, its all been done before, all you are doing cognitively is running a simulation of what it would sound like to say it, so as to perform as well as possible when you do have to say it.
All of this points to, imho, the realization that language or thought is not the human miracle we make it to be. Philosophers have historically failed to understand the nature of cognition and language, and thus its always been almost impossible to understand why or how something that doesnt speak would have thoughts. Reducing thoughts to subvocalization however shows that, if the point of it is performance, then thats not predicated on the need for linguistic organisation. A cat probably has a certain value by which he can evaluate if his or her behaviour helps her reach her goal, and thus predictive virtualization would be useful to him or her. The human miracle in regards to language is not that we have it at all, its that we have managed to free it from its cognitive shackles, so to speak, and that we've made ourselves into being that basically can always freely engage in acts of subvocalization. Our thoughts arent specifically and immediately predicated by the end purpose of subvocalization, which is just to make sure we dont say embarrassing things or stutter.