The thoughts themselves are the thinker.
William James
One of many[1] impediments to modelling the mind in an ideationally consistent way is the simple fact that the word ‘mind’, like ‘fire’ and ‘life’, is a noun. Nouns construe experience as things, whether concrete or abstract.[2] Construing fire, life and mind as things entails construing them as composed as substances. In failing to detect the substances of fire and life, ideationally-consistent models emerged only when they were instead construed as processes. In failing to detect the substance of mind, the substance has been construed as immaterial, and so beyond the range of empirical scientific modelling.[3]
An alternative way to model mind, with the promise of doing so in an ideationally consistent way, is to construe it as a process. This is to construe the brain as the material medium of the “mind” process, and the mind as a function of the brain as physiological system, in the same way that digestion is a function of the alimentary canal as physiological system. However, the brain alone is insufficient to understand the process labelled ‘mind’ if the brain functions as an evolutionary system which adapts to the rest of the body and to the contextual environment in which the body is required to function. Further, the contextual environment to which brain functions adapt includes other bodies whose behaviours express the potentials of brains embedded within them, and through which brain functions adapt to one another.
Footnotes:
[1] Another impediment to modelling the mind in an ideationally consistent way is the high interpersonal value placed on surviving death.
[2] Nouns that are obviously derived from verbs, such as ‘formation’, construe a process as the congruent construal, but words like ‘fire’, ‘life’ and ‘mind’ display no hint of such a construal.
[3] This construal of mind is largely consistent with the religious notion of soul.