Mind
The word 'mind', as an abstract noun, refers to no observable physical entity, but to a faculty of human beings associated with their ability to think, broadly defined, and to experience events of reality non-consciously, consciously, and self-consciously.
In verbal forms, 'mind' refers to human behaviors related to the concept of paying attention to something characterized by such phrases as "mind what I tell you", "mind your own business", "minded the babysitter", "mind your manners", "he doesn't mind taking out the garbage" — typically referring to observable behaviors in contrast to the unobservable entity of the nominalized form, mind.
Thus, though 'mind' today is used both as noun and verb, before the sixteenth century, people had souls, not minds, and 'mind' was used as a verb, 'minding', 'to mind' (Szasz 1996).
Nominalization of verbs, typically creating an abstract entity, reifying the action/activity into a 'thing', appears as a natural tendency in humans, exemplified as such nominalizations/reifications as thinking to thought, living to life, experiencing consciously to consciousness. In the case of nominalizing minding to mind, studies of the nature and meaning of mind often stray from considerations of the nature and meaning of the reality of the physically observable processes that become abstracted into a non-physically observable, non-existent entity.
Notes
References
- Szasz, Thomas. (1996) The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience. Westport, CT: Praeger. | Google Books preview. | Thomas Szasz: Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. | Citizendium article: Thomas Szasz. | Books by Thomas Szasz.