That's the second interpretation. From inside, so to speak, you have no sensation of those buzzing electrons and reacting chemicals. Instead, you have a very vivid impression of a large grey creature with flappy ears and a trunk, sailing improbably through space and crashing disastrously to the ground. Mind is what it feels like to be a brain. The same physical events acquire a totally different meaning when viewed from the inside. One task of science is to try to bridge the gap between those two interpretations. The first step is to figure out which bits of the brain do what when you think a particular thought. To reconstruct, in fact, the elephant from the electrons. That's not yet possible, but every day brings it a step closer. Even when science gets there, it will probably not be able to explain why your impression of that elephant is so vivid, or why it takes exactly the form that it does.
In the study of consciousness there is a technical term for what a perception 'feels like'. It is called a quale (pronounced 'kwah-lay', not 'quail'), a figment that our minds paint on to their model of the universe in the way that an artist adds pigment to a portrait. Such qualia (plural)
paint the world in vivid colours so that we can respond more quickly to it, and, in particular, respond to signs of danger, food, possible sexual partners ... Science has no explanation of why qualia feel like they do, and it's not likely to get one. So science can explain how a mind works, but not what it is like to be one. No shame in that: after all, physicists can explain how an electron works, but not what it is like to be one. Some questions are beyond science. And, we suspect, beyond anything else: it is easy enough to claim an explanation of these metaphysical problems, but just as impossible to prove you're right. Science admits it can't handle these things, so at least it's honest.
At any rate, the science of the mind (small 'M' now because we're not talking metaphysics)
addresses how the mind works, and how it evolved, but not what it's like to be one. Even with this limitation, the science of the brain is not the whole story. There is another important dimension to the question of Mind. Not how the brain works and what it does, but how it came to be like that.
How, on Roundworld, did Mind evolve from mindless creatures?
Much of the answer lies not inside the brain, but in its interactions with the rest of the universe.
Especially other brains. Human beings are social animals, and they communicate with each other. The trick of communication made a huge, qualitative change to the evolution of the brain and its ability to house a mind. It accelerated the evolutionary process, because the transfer of ideas happens much faster than the transfer of genes.
How do we communicate? We tell stories. And that, we shall argue, is the real secret of Mind.
Which brings us back to Discworld, because on Discworld things really do work the way human minds think they do on Roundworld. Especially when it comes to stories.
Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen, and magic is what turns stories into reality. On Discworld, things happen because people expect them to. The sun comes up every day because that's its job: it was set up to provide light for the people to see by, and it comes up during the day when people need it. That's what suns do; that's what they're for. And it's a proper, sensible sun, too: a smallish fire not very far away, which goes over and under the Disc, incidentally but entirely logically causing one of the elephants to lift a leg to let it pass. It's not the ridiculous, pathetic kind of sun that we have - absolutely gigantic, infernally hot, and nearly a hundred million miles away because it's too dangerous to be near. And we go round it instead of it going round us, which is crazy, especially since what every human being on the planet sees, other than the visually impaired, is the latter. It's a terrible waste of material just to make daylight
...
On Discworld, the eighth son of an eighth son must become a wizard. There's no escaping the power of story: the outcome is inevitable. Even if, as in Equal Rites, the eighth son of an eighth son is a girl. Great A'Tuin the turtle must swim though space with four elephants on its back and the entire Discworld on top of them, because that's what a world-bearing turtle has to do. The narrative structure demands it. Moreover, on Discworld everything that there is6 exists as a thing.
To use the philosophers' language, concepts are reified: made real. Death is not just a process of cessation and decay: he is also a person, a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe, and he TALKS
LIKE THIS. On Discworld, the narrative imperative is reified into a substance, narrativium.
Narrativium is an element, like sulphur or hydrogen or uranium. Its symbol ought to be something like Na, but thanks to a bunch of ancient Italians that's already reserved for sodium
(so much for So). So it's probably Nv, or maybe Zq given what they've done to sodium. Be that as it may, narrativium is an element on Discworld, so it lives somewhere in the Disc's analogue of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table. Where? The Bursar of Unseen University, the only wizard insane enough to understand imaginary numbers, would doubtless tell us that there is no question: it is the umpty-umpth element.
Discworld narrativium is a substance. It takes care of narrative imperatives, and ensures they are obeyed. On Roundworld, our world, humans act as if narrativium exists here, too. We expect it not to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on, and it would be unfair (in both senses) if rain spoiled the occasion.
Or, more often, given the pessimistic ways of our country folk, we expect it to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on. Most people expect the universe to be mildly malevolent but hope it will be kindly disposed, whereas scientists expect it to be indifferent. Drought-struck farmers pray for rain, in the express hope that the universe or owner thereof will hear their words and suspend the laws of meteorology for their benefit. Some, of course, actually believe just that, and for all anyone can prove, they could be right. This is a tricky question, and a delicate one; let us just say that no reputable scientific observer has yet caught God breaking the laws of physics
(although of course He might be too clever for them) and leave it at that for the moment.
And this is where Mind takes centre stage.
The curious thing about the human belief in narrativium is that once humans evolved on the planet, their beliefs started to be true. We have, in a way, created our own narrativium. It exists in our minds, and there it is a process, not a thing. On the level of the material universe, it's just one more pattern of buzzing electrons. But on the level of what it feels like to be a mind, it operates just like narrativium. Not only that: it operates on the material world, not just the mental one: its effects are just like those of narrativium. Generally our minds control our bodies sometimes they don't, and indeed sometimes it's the other way round, especially during adolescence -and our bodies make things happen out there in the material world. Within each person there is a 'strange loop', which confuses the mental and material levels of existence.
This strange loop has a curious effect on causality. We get up in the morning and leave the house at 7.15 because we have to get to work by 9 o'clock. Scientifically, this is a very bizarre form of causality: the future is affecting the past. That doesn't normally occur in physics (except in very esoteric Quantum things, but let's not get distracted). In this case, science has an explanation.
What causes you to get up at 7.15 is not actually your future arrival at work. If in fact you fall under a bus and never make it to work, you still got up at 7.15. Instead of backwards causality, you have a mental model, in your brain, which is your best attempt to predict the day ahead. In that model, realised as buzzing electrons, you think that you ought to be at work by nine. That model, and its expectation of the future, exists now, or more accurately, a short time in the past.