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So, I hate to be a stickler about these things (okay, that's not true, I love it...) a coma is technically a separate medical condition from a vegitative state. PVS patients have no discernable cerebral activity (and thus, no level of consciousness). Coma patients, on the other hand, display a wide range of levels of conciousness. To be prescise, we should probably only be speaking of individuals in permanent vegitative states for the purposes of this arguement...

Any way, on to the substantive comments... Descartes sort of gave birth to the idea of a mind as a non-physical entity separate from the body. He argues that he knows the mind and body must be of two distinct types, because while the body can be put assunder, the mind is always and essentially individisible. (But even Descartes, touted to be the Granddaddy of mind-body dualism says that the mind's existance within the body must not be as "a sailor is within a ship", rather a much more intimate and primary relationship must exist between the two) But before Descartes came along and suggested a metaphyscal conception of the soul or mind, the generally accepted idea of 'spirit' was the one put forth by Aristotle (whose ideas I haven't actually read first hand, so if I mess this up, some one please correct me...)

Aristotle held that the soul (psyche?) was co-extensive with the body, and a very principle of the body's being alive. The idea of a physical soul was largely abandoned in a post-decartesian world, but it offers some very interesting implications for the "problem" of mind-body dualism/unity. So while modern conceptions put the 'mind' as a non-spaitially extended phenomena not present in vegetative brains, a more ancient (but not necessarily worse) model of the 'mind' could allow the vegetative body to have a soul.... just and idea of play around with.

However, if we decide we don't like Aristotle's ideas (and let's face it, the man was wrong about a lot in life, there's no garuntee that his ideas on the soul are any more accurate than his ideas on physics...) I really like Caitin Jeschke's idea (listed a few posts down) of the mind as an emergent property. I wrote a term paper for my Logic & Language course on the implications of mind-body unity and dualism on medical ethics, and that idea of an emergent phenomenon was very similar to the conclusion I came to in my person attempt to rectify the paradox.

Roughly summarized, I suppose my idea could be stated that a Person (Caitlin's "emergent mind") consists of the synthesis of a non-physical soul with a spacially extended body. The logical paradox, of course, is that we cannot have the unity of two things which reside in different logical categories (the body is a physical thing, like rocks, trees, etc. while the mind is of a non-physical thing, like 7, the Pythagorean Theorum or the concept of Color) But surely we have come across paradoxes of this sort before... physics now acknowledges the unity of space-time: a concept which, before Einstein, would have been considered ridiculous. Of course, in every day normal circumstances, we can treat time and space as separate. Just like we can normally treat physical and non-physical things as separate. However, what if a living person is something akin to traveling at relativistic speeds? All of a sudden, space and time cannot be considered in isolation from one another, just as in a living person, we cannot completely separate mind and body (brain)....

I suppose it's with this rather un-organized non-question specific answer I must leave, because it's late and I'm tired. I hope that my rambling hasn't been too confusing, and that there aren't too many spelling errors, but this blog-post-window-box-thingy has no spell check, so if there are, please forgive me.

-Molly.