We may define a 'mind' as a collection of events connected with each other by memory-chains backwards and forwards. We know about one such collection of events - namely, that constituting ourself - more intimately and directly than we know about anything else in the world. In regard to what happens to ourself, we know not only abstract logical structure, but also qualities ... This is the sort of thing that we cannot know where the physical world is concerned.
Source: Bertrand Russell: My Philosophical Development, 1959, chapter 2
More info.: https://russell-j.com/beginner/BR_MPD_02-120.HTM
* a brief comment:
We gradually come to understand the world through our sense organs. Yet in everyday life we often think we know things we have never directly experienced. This tendency is the flip side of our powers of inference and imagination, and it can sometimes lead to misunderstandings or illusions.
Take, for example, the three photographs attached to "Today's Russell Quotation":
Left: a view of Mt Fuji glimpsed through forest trees (prompting sight -- and perhaps imagined sounds of the woods)
Center: a close-up of a luxury towel (prompting the sense of touch)
Right: a full course of Japanese cuisine (prompting taste and smell)
Relying on our past knowledge and experience, we instantly imagine the texture each image suggests--the philosopher's "qualia." Many people raised in Japan share roughly the same impressions, whereas those from different cultural backgrounds may not. Infants, who lack sufficient experience, can scarcely grasp such textures at all.
Turning to Russell's neutral monism, the physical and the mental are not two distinct substances; both are manifestations of a single neutral stuff. From this standpoint it is only natural to conclude that when the body dies, the mind disappears as well. There is nothing mystical about it: if humankind were to become extinct, the human mind would likewise vanish from the universe -- no more and no less.
Anyone who claims that mind existed in the cosmos before the emergence of humanity must presuppose a transcendent being akin to a god. But does such a god truly exist, or is it merely a product of human imagination? -- Following Russell, I acknowledge agnosticism in theory, while in practice I adopt an atheistic stance.
