Mental property
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A mental property or a mind property is a property of a/the mind. Mental properties are studied by many sciences and parasciences. We may only mention: psychology, cognitive sciences and recently also systemics.
[edit] Systemic mental perspective
According to the systemic conceptualization of the TOGA meta-theory, mental properties are perceived as the results of functioning of a brain - natural or artificial, they are abstract objects, not physically observed. Therefore property is a transitive relation and the mind properties are also the properties of its brain. Modeling of a mind is based on the identification of its properties. The fundamental, and, in parallel, most complex property of a mind is called intelligence.
There are three main scientific approaches to the study/modeling of mind (properties).
- The primary is classical one, it considers mind as an intrinsic property of human brain only.
- The second is focused on the engineering research for the development of an abstract/syntetic mind/brain for robots and computers which satisfies before assumed its requested functional properties.
- The third is a most universal research, it dealing with a concept of generalized/universal and syntetic mind as a possible or existing property of the Universe. Such research is the common interdysciplinary domain of interest of the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and different systemic and meta-systemic approches with a strong contribution of physicists and mathematicians.
Anyway the basic concrete objective of all these research is to develop such model of mind/intelligence which could be implemented on the computer and could be considered sufficiently "human like" or better (?).
[edit] Philosophy of mind perspective
A simple concrete example: If someone pricks you with a pin, you will most likely feel pain. That instance of feeling pain is an instantiation of the property being in (or a) pain. It is important to distinguish between the predicate 'is a pain' which is a linguistic entity, and the property denoted by the predicate. This becomes important in the philosophy of mind when the two are confused, especially concerning intertheoretic reductionism and ontological reductionism.
