A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, July 15, 2018, 13:33 (2114 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Where does gibberish fit in?

dhw: If the ions bring material thoughts from your material brain to your immaterial soul (which is supposed to have initiated them in English anyway!), and the soul has to translate them into English before your soul can understand the material thoughts in order to make them immaterial, the thoughts carried by the ions must be gibberish, i.e. incomprehensible in their wet “material” form. If I were a dualist, I would believe that the soul thinks its immaterial thoughts in English and sends them to the brain in order to give them material expression.

DAVID: I/soul initiate thought into wet ions, where they become electrical charges. They come out from the wet ions as intelligible thought. This is the process you keep skipping in your separatist approach to soul/brain mechanisms. This is what we don't understand, but we know it haoppens.

And there was me believing that your dualist’s English-speaking soul came up with perfectly intelligible thoughts which it transported to the brain, which in turn sent the thoughts to the voice or fingers or hands or other parts of the body to turn the perfectly intelligible thoughts into sounds, movements etc. that would give them material expression/implementation.

I had no idea that your English-speaking thoughts were unintelligible to your English-speaking soul until your English-speaking soul had "initiated them into wet ions" (no chance then of the afterlife soul thinking intelligible thoughts), which then brought them back to your English-speaking soul to translate them back into the English in which they started (though since last week apparently the thoughts coming out of the wet ions are intelligible, in which case they don’t need to be translated after all). I do wish your soul would withhold this theory from your wet ions!

dhw: We have long since agreed that if there is such a thing as a soul, it is housed in the brain and is “interlocked” with it. But the soul and the brain perform different functions - that is the sense in which they are separate.

DAVID: They function together as described above and are not separate as they work.

Agreed. Two parts with different functions which work together are two parts with different functions that work together.

dhw: The dualist’s soul uses the brain to provide the information it thinks about (why have you left that out?). Example of information provided by brain: me hungry, me see living meat. The soul initiates the concept of a spear. It therefore uses the brain and body to construct a spear, but then the brain supplies more information (spear no kill living meat; something wrong with concept), and so the soul does some more thinking (i.e. develops the thought: need sharper stone, longer shaft, better aim) and sends more instructions to the brain to do more implementing, and so on until the thought or concept is complete and the material implementation is complete (spear kill animal). That is how the dualist’s soul “uses the dualist’s brain to develop thought”: two parts of the self – the thinking part (soul) and the information-gathering, expressing/implementing part (brain) working in harmony.

DAVID:In all of this hominin exposition you have not said the soul uses the brain's networks to produce and think the thoughts about the spear.

Yes I have, and I have told you HOW the soul uses the brain.

DAVID: You have the soul imparting thought to the brain.

Yes, and I also have the brain supplying the soul with the information it thinks about.

DAVID: That is your 'interlock' concept. As for the source of information, I've said over and over the brain supplies all of the five sensory details needed.

Yes. So what’s the problem? The soul gathers information from the brain and then sends instructions to the brain to express/implement its thoughts. What other use does the soul make of the brain (apart from your new and unintelligible wet ion translation theory)?