What is a Mind?

There are so many different views of what makes up a mind. At first most everybody was saying that only humans and animals can have minds. Now I'm starting to hear that all natural things have minds, including plants. However, Most everybody will still not consider a computer to have a mind. What it really comes down to is how we define a mind. What does something need to have in order to have a mind??

Descartes Cognitive Realist

After looking at Descartes belief of the world, I noticed that I don't agree with his order; 

Minds->God->World. I still wonder how did the minds come about if nothing just happens to be as simple as this belief of the world. The way most of us see the world; 

Minds<-Ideas<-World<-God, still may be wrong but it makes more since to me. Why does Descartes make such assumption about the order that things came to be?? To me and probably to the majority in this class, I believe that there was some kind of divine intervention (God) that definitely had to be the start to everything.

The General Public and the Media

After doing our group presentations last week, I noticed that most everybody in the class did not necessarily agree with the majority of what the news networks showed. It came up to my mind, why does the general public in the United States not stand up to what these news networks show on the news the majority of the time, if not always? I believe that if anything is to change, it is up to the majority and if we keep being "ignorant," then these news networks are going to keep feeding us what really is not actually important.