The 'mind' is an abstraction, it does not exist in physical space, ergo, it never did exist in your 'brain' or 'anywhere else'. It does not have a 'location'. And this is without getting into tangential metaphysical issues ...
If the mind didn't have a specific location, events st any specific location could not affect it. Since they can (someone talking to me here in my house in England affects my mental state) and events at other locations cannot (unless they have a telephone or similar device relocating the sound of their voice here, if they try talking to me in China it won't affect me at all), clearly the mind has a location.
I don't think the article makes the problem sound trivial. The title does, because it's the usual baitiness. We replaced it with a primary phrase from the text itself.
You lost the essence of the article by changing the title to a trite observation. The point the author is (presumably) making is a bit outrageous: that you not live just in your own brain but in the brain of the others you're related to.
I say presumably because I haven't read Siegel's book, but am extrapolating from the same thread which was woven by Hofstadter in "I am a Strange Loop". A more popular yet similar exposition of this idea is the word Ubuntu, which you can roughly grasp using the aphorism "A person is a person through other people".
The article title definitely colored my perception, thanks for replacing it.
That being said, there are parts of this article that
come across as trivializing the issue:
> Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind.
Neither monists nor dualists would dispute this, but the article makes it sound like it's a sole necessary result of the dualist view. I guess I'm not being a charitable reader, but this does a disservice to both sides (and to Siegel, whose actual claim is much more nuanced than the article makes it out to be).
Not sure if you're positing dualism or just being cautious.
Thought exercise: how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain (and the experience your brain is having right now)? Any answer in the form of a number implies that you don't really believe in dualism.
One could do the same with other "abstractions" (quoting just because of the vagueness of the term in comments sections on hackernews). What about the operating system in your computer? Where is "Windows" or "Linux"? It's a lot of different pages of code and data in memory, but pages are just collections of cache lines and memory activation lines and disk sectors...it's hard to pin down what is "operating system" and what is not "operating system". But even so, one can easily draw a box around your physical computer and say that your operating system definitely _is_ in there.
Why should your mind be any different? It is just the software of your brain. It inhabits time and space just as anything else does.
The brain gives rise to the mind, in the same way that the physical computer, in operation, gives rise to abstract computational processes. Could you pinpoint these processes exactly in space/time? No. You can pause the computer and _inspect the state of the system_, but this not the same as pinpointing the _process itself_. The process does not exist inside the debugger.
Yet you can not say that these processes do not exist or that they don't have an (abstract) location. Assuming a non-distributed model, if you kill the physical computer, you also kill whatever emergent properties it has. The same is true for brain and mind.
The 'mind' is an abstraction, it does not exist in physical space, ergo, it never did exist in your 'brain' or 'anywhere else'. It does not have a 'location'. And this is without getting into tangential metaphysical issues ...