Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, August 25, 2012, 12:19 (4233 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: How much ghost is there in a newborn? The brain has to develop enough to create a mind, or to receive it. But I experienced creating myself. I did not feel that it was radioed to me to accept. -Dhw: Nor, however, can I conceive of any form of non-physical energy that is aware of itself and somehow gets into my skull to exercise control over my brain.-DAVID: Exactly. You are separating the two, the material brain and the mind too much. They are intertwined. You create the 'non-physical energy' and you control it. Mind and brain do separate in an NDE, which strengthens the concept of afterlife, a gathering of quantum souls in a giant herd in heaven.-"You" create... "you" control the energy. But in dualism "you" ARE your immaterial will/memories/ emotions etc. It is these, your own faculties, that send signals to your brain ... they are not "radioed" from somewhere else. Once you start claiming that the mind does separate in an NDE, you are committed to the idea of an immaterial mind which is independent of the brain. "You" ARE the "non-physical energy". In a previous post you suggested that the brain created the energy, and now you are suggesting that the you which IS the energy creates and controls the energy! 
 
How much ghost is there in a newborn? Of course I don't know the answer, nor do I even believe that this is what happens. But if I did believe in dualism, I would probably answer that this non-physical energy is virtually blank until it is worked on (very swiftly and then continuously) by experience. This ties in with a quote from one of the articles you drew our attention to: -DAVID: Self awareness, a major component of consciousness is studied in brain-damaged patients. Self awareness comes from everywhere:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120822181228.htm-"Here, we have a patient who is missing all the areas in the brain that are typically thought to be needed for self-awareness yet he remains self-aware," says co-corresponding author Justin Feinstein, who earned his doctorate at the UI in February. "Clearly, neuroscience is only beginning to understand how the human brain can generate a phenomenon as complex as self-awareness."
 
Neuroscience is not even beginning to understand consciousness, and that may be because neuroscientists have already made up their minds that it is generated by the brain. One could scarcely wish for a more direct pointer to dualism than the above example, although no neuroscientist would dare say so. And yet everybody knows that non-physical experiences affect the body. Emotions like fear, anxiety, love, excitement cause chemicals to be discharged, and it is not the chemicals that cause the emotions. The inference, then, is that it is not the chemicals that produce our consciousness, but vice versa. How an abstraction can produce something so material we do not know, any more than a materialist knows how chemicals can produce something so abstract.
 
However, the mind/identity is constantly changing, again through an inexplicable process of abstract experience imprinting itself on the dualist's immaterial energy (or the materialist's brain). If I remember rightly, our process theologian Frank talked about God releasing particles of himself, and this might perhaps fit into the dualist scenario: that each living being inherits a particle of God's conscious energy, and this is exposed day in day out to the experiences of life, which progressively fashion the identity. The body will inevitably influence it, since the body is also part of our experience, and as this energy is enclosed in a physical framework, naturally the two interact so long as the physical framework is alive. When it dies, the particle returns to the universal energy, while still retaining the identity it has formed during the life of the physical being. This would account for many mystic and psychic experiences.
 
Alternatively, we are nothing but our material cells and their chemical interactions. A much simpler theory, but just as incredible, incomprehensible and confusing.


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