A Logical Inquiry of Emotions and Cognition

Abstract

Experimental procedures in neuroscience rely on the standpoints that the mind is a functional state of the brain and a clear subdivision among different mental faculties does exist in the cortex. According to cognitive neuroscientists, the term "mind" encompasses just the "cognitive" faculties, such as consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, memory, leaving apart the "emotional" states. Here, taking into account the powerful tools of the first-order predicate logic, we evaluated whether: a) the mind is a function on the physical brain activity; b) different mental faculties can be reduced to a more general one; c) the division of mental faculties in cognition and emotion holds true. We demonstrated that nervous activity is equivalent to mental faculties and that emotions and cognition do not stand for two separated functions of the mind. This means that, counter to our common-sense belief, cognition and emotions are splitted and every faculty of the mind necessarily displays a counterpart in other ones. We point out how it is possible for condensed mind faculties to be unglued in order to become apparently different functions. Therefore, seemingly different mind faculties turn out to be equivalent, because the same logical framework holds for all the types of brain activities, independent of their boundaries and magnitude.