Dualism versus materialism; addendum (Identity)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 13, 2017, 18:37 (2439 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: How can there be new demands if the soul/brain cannot imagine them?

dhw: In your dualistic world it is NOT the brain that imagines them. You keep agreeing that the “soul” does the imagining and so makes the demands, which the brain implements.

Yes, when the brain is complex enough to allow that.

DAVID: I view each earlier hominin stage as being unable to envision anything beyond the stage of brain complexity they possess for their self/soul to employ.

dhw: And so your hominin is unable to conceive of a spear until your God has increased the size or complexity of his brain to allow him to make a spear. And then hominin says to himself: “I have the capacity to make a spear. This gives me a new idea. I can make a spear.”
Presumably the same process as your God equipping the pre-whale with fins before it enters the water, or fiddling with hominin legs before they descend to the ground.

Not legs, but spine and pelvis. Generally correct.

DAVID: Each stage indicates its limits by its artifacts, as paleontologists show.

dhw: Paleontologists can only show the material implementation of ideas. They cannot show which came first: the idea or the means of implementing the idea. However, this does not present a problem for materialists, since they will argue that ideas are engendered by the brain and there is no such thing as a “soul”. Hence random mutations, upright posture, cooked food etc. explain the expansion/complexification of the brain which gives rise to more and more new ideas. So welcome once again to materialism. And it may well be right. But not if there’s a “soul” that engenders new ideas and even survives the death of the brain (a hypothesis which you now seem reluctant to include in your arguments).

Not reluctant. And you are again twisting or ignoring my statements. The analogy is the self/soul running a bigger more complex brain it has been given in each stage of enlargement, like a new better hardware/software just as when you buy an upgraded computer.. And the soul leaves a dead brain to go to an afterlife. I am a dualist. Why are you so obsessed with materialism with their false random mutation approach?

DAVID: The “effort to do something new – would have RESULTED in expansion” is against all the evidence we have from science.

dhw: Can you please tell me what evidence science has supplied that your God intervened at various times (or preprogrammed all the stages 3.8 billion years ago) to increase the size of the material brain, and only then was the immaterial “soul” able to come up with its new ideas?

The analogy as above. We know the brains jumped in size and presumable complexity as cortex was added. I say God did it with a drive in cortical size.