We need an ontology of agreed-upon definitions for these types of concepts. The best one that I know of is Cognitive Atlas (http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/). Be sure to take a look, as it also contains functional information about the relation of the concept to other concepts, and standard ways to measure it.

According to it, Consciousess is "the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself; the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact; the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought; the totality of conscious states of an individual; the normal state of conscious life,(regained consciousness); the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes." (http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concept/id/trm_4a3fd79d09e35)

Folks like Andy Clark would like to suggest that the mind may be "extended" across the entire body...and even as far out as the tools and relationships that bodies have available to them.

Please refer to my recent article on visuospatial consciousness where a medical condition due to damage to right  parital cortex leads to a visual and bodily neglect by the patient provides how brain and body function as mind . In summary the entire body is integrated by by the thalamus into a singular space where all internal space forms an infrastructure that duplicates the external world . In other words the entire intrapersonal space forms a unitary space  that  represents visual and non visual external  space as well as all internal body inputs into one seamless consciousness.  This article has 3 D illustrations that explain the mind now published in August edition of Consciousness and Cognition. 

Article Neural correlates of visuospatial consciousness in 3D defaul...

Fascinating question that I am not sure I am qualified to answer!  Somewhat philosophical in a way because I am not sure that we do have a definition that really encompasses all that is the Mind!  Ravinder's description of contralateral neglect demonstrates that awareness and consciousness are so very complex and do include much of the body.  Another condition that exemplifies this is Blindsight, where someone has some sort of disconnect or lesion that interrupts the information from the visual system that normally produces perception of the visual world, producing a sensation of being blind - that's a fascinating one!  I have always espoused the monistic view that the mind is a function of the brain.  I still believe that, but I don't think it's a simple concept.  Just read a few of Oliver Sack's books - The Man who MIstook His Wife for a Hat, or A Leg to Stand On - for examples of what the brain and/or body can do to consciousness.  Just my simple thoughts!!

Thanks to all the researchers who answered the question in their own way. Different persons from different disciplines have defined the mind from their own perspective. But I believe we should find a common ground for defining the mind. @

I don't have an answer, but I'll offer pointers.  John Anderson's 2007 book has the title "How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe?" and in it he discusses progress toward answering that question. That question came from a career-summarizing talk by Allen Newell which is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2x1-_y5T6k.

I'd suggest you start there and keep an open mind.  Neuroscientists like to think they can explain the mind with spiking neurons, but I suggest there's a long way between spiking neurons and the mind and way too many assumptions involved.

From the brief discussion above it is obvious that there are two parallel levels of description: the brain and neural architecture on the one hand and loosely, phenomenology on the other. Once we have an embracing definition of mind I suspect we will have solved the mind body problem, one of the outstanding questions in science. It will include descriptions of conscious thought and unconscious motives at least. I suspect it will require the positing of a neural algorithm of motor experience in categorizing sensory input. It comes back to an intuitive reading of embodiment as a theoretical way forward.

To come back to the original question common ground will differ for different disciplines as descriptive levels of mind do not currently interact except in a cursory way. For example, memory for a neuroscientist and the tools he/she uses will differ from what it means for a psychologist. That's why concepts like 'global workspace theory' are not very useful outside its intended audience. Many theories really just rephrase the same problem for explanation, but are not particularly illuminating. What is required is old-fashioned integrationsist theories in this world of hyperspecialization and impressive technology.

If to try to answer the original question in the shortest version, I would suggest defining mind as self-organizing information. I believe that the only content of the mind is information in some more or less active forms (or you know some another content of mind?). Therefore, to define the mind is to define the specific organization of the information, which leads to emergence the mind as the new system’s quality of some previously not so organized information content. One of key qualities of this new system is, apparently, the self-organization, without which the mind as a whole system would not emerge in biological organisms. Of course, we can study these key qualities of the information through the examination of relevant characteristics of its physical media — neurons, microtubules, photons, etc. But if we will not think about that information as mind’s content, we will see only a well-studied self-governing bio-system without any mind, and our research easily go far away from the mind.

So where is personality in your answer, Sergey?  Is that part of the organization?

From my point of view, personality is the subsystem of most stable features of the mind, its core that most closely and consistently associated with the center of mind as information system - with image of "Me" (which is necessary for this system to self-organizing itself as something separate from the rest of the world).

In other words, information content of the mind in general is very dynamic, volatile, easily reorganized (to reflect the changing world), very large in size and quite similar to the multitude of people (thanks to sameness of the environment and culture). But in any similar and complex systems one may identify stable central features that allow us to distinguish between these systems and at least approximately predict their dynamics. It is necessary for a stable identification of such systems and for interaction with them. I believe that in the information systems of people around us (and inside us) we also have to seek such core subsystem and we call it personality.

Thank you all for your interesting comments; I read with great interest the article by Jerath and Crawford and also the other mentioned.

“Mind” is a topic I've been following a long time, and I consider it essential, but perhap, as in the tree of knowledge, the answer to this question only generate new questions. Perhaps the ultimate answer requires ulterior bioelectric and magnetoencephalographic investigations, as well as diffusion tensor imaging, instead of fMRI.

Our group from the Canary Islands, Spain has long worked with blind people in the development of a prototype that allows perceiving the environment through sound (also in the European project called CASBLIP); one of the most striking findings was the rapid mental construction of the new perception of a remote space, the space beyond the hand and up to a dozen meters range of the device. It was an experience that users described as very nice and new. We also found that in some blind users with visual experience, the perception of distant objects through the sounds generated by the apparatus involved the perception of light –phosphenes-, although we could not determine the involvement of the thalamus, but V1 by fMRI. (http://fens2004.neurosciences.asso.fr/posters/R7/A224_3.html) .

Building a visual experience in blind people using sounds suggests that the experience of the mind can be relatively independent of the sensory channel and based on attributes from the stimulus (position, distance, for example), as in the default 3D space suggested by Jerath and Crawford, rather than based on the sensory channel, and perhaps the thalamus indeed could play a role.

Given that sounds can generate phosphenes in some blind persons, mind may be a brain function that could be independent of perception. Its definition must include its constant residence, except in the dream, but also the access to memories, as well as its modulation by internal states such as emotions or physiological states. To me, the whole brain is involved in the mind, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual processing. Of course, research on neglect, as the Jerath and Crawford proposal, or as in the Ramachandran et al. work [(1999), Med. Hypoth, 52(4):303-305] contribute to understanding the role of perception and its integration in all mental functions, and also the mind itself.

In any case, understanding-definition of the meaning of the mind, I think it must be accompanied by an explanation of its origins in the human evolutionary line. In this sense, I think that the permanence of care-will and deployment of thought, which is the sustenance and support of mind, perhaps could be explained in human evolution in mother-child relationship, as I recently published in a crazy proposal in the journal "Advances in Anthropology" , entitled "love is the cause of human evolution."

Dear All, mental activity may be not-conscious or conscious. A computer or a calculating machine perform not-conscious mental operations. In this case, what they do is self-organizing information processing as proposed by Sergey. However, this processing goes beyond Shannon/Weaver mathematical theory of information, since the machine can have semantic rules, which are not included in the theory. Biological systems also have semantic rules developed in the evolutionary process. These rules operate unconsciously.

Mental conscious activity requires another ingredient, besides self-organizing information processing with semantic rules. It requires subjective experiences containing feelings or 'qualia' (qualitative experiences such as color, sound, taste, pain, etc.). An approach to this three-level structure can be found in my attached paper.

Yes, as noted by Micah Amd, the concept of information is very difficult and uncertain. There are many definitions of information and there is no universally accepted definition. This makes it difficult to use the concept of information in the construction of any theory. We can try to define the mind with the use of the concept of information only if we bear in mind some its definition that satisfies us.

In our study, we firstly studied different approaches to information, then formulated our own definition, and then used it in the construction of the theory and experiments on a computer model of information system (we have formalized the concept of information for preparing algorithm of record the emergence and transformation of information as objective phenomenon in our computer model, regardless of the experimenter’s opinion).

In our study, information is defined through the system of relationships between relatively general objects and their relatively particular variants (states, versions etc). In the computer model that definition and algorithm gave us possibility to register simplest units of information - about the presence / absence of a given stimulus.

From my point of view, information is a systemic feature of our world, that is, this property is objectively determined by the presence of the general properties of the organization of different objects. So the quantity of information in the world is much more than of its material carriers. But that property — information — does not represent anything significant itself, until due to the interaction of it’s material carriers does organize itself in a particular form — mind.

So to define the mind the notion of information is as important as the concept of self-organization, which includes both the emergence of a system (from original unorganized content) and maintenance of the existence and development of this system. By the way, the self-organization gives qualitatively new system properties both to matter and information. If to try to formulate briefly my views on this issue, I would say that the self-organizing matter is life, and self-organizing information is mind (including unconscious and conscious information processing). And those self-organizations are steps of one ladder, from my point of view.