Religion as a cultural ensemble

A mind/brain of many parts

Consider the contrast between two distinct ways of interacting with the environment. On the one hand, the mind/brain sees the world. It perceives colour, shape and movement, noticing just what is salient. On the other hand, the mind/brain comprehends speech. It grasps from sounds the content of what is uttered and just what the speaker meant in uttering it. Now reflect upon how different these are, how different the input and how differently they are presented to consciousness. The structures of the mind/brain that process language and process vision deal with two different kinds of input and perform two different functions. This isn't surprising. In any organism, we find the same pattern; a hierarchy of systems performing specialized jobs within larger containing systems right up to the level of how the whole organism is adapted to its environment.

This picture of the mind is an abstract characterization of properties of the brain. We hope and assume that these abstract accounts are ultimately reducible into less abstract descriptions of neuro-physiological functioning at the level of biology. But for an abstract explanation to be true as a theory in psychology, descriptions of the physical substrate which expounds it don't need to be in a one-to-one relation to the objects and processes in the abstract account. Nevertheless, most scientists assume that the system described by psychology is ultimately physical so that the mind and brain are the same phenomenon under different descriptions.