Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 20:48 (3293 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: What is the “you” that uses your brain to control your brain? Materialists will argue that the “you” IS the brain. But since we don't know the source of consciousness, nobody can tell us that “you” are wholly material or partly immaterial. It's not just a matter of knowing how it all works, but of knowing WHAT is at work: the brain, or an immaterial identity that controls the brain?-DAVID: I use my brain to know 'me'. The brain is a tool I can command. My concept of me is immaterial, as it involves my thinking about myself, using the brain as a tool. Granted we do not know how it works, but this view of how I know 'me' is very obvious. In the rest of my body I don't have that capability. My digestion proceeds without my intervention. I can speed up my heart by exercise, but that is a secondary type of intervention, not direct. The brain is directly responsive to me. As a kid when I learned to play the piano, areas of my brain grew. As I grew up my brain grew grey matter to help me.-Your concept of you, then, is of an immaterial David who occupies your body. This of course fits in with NDEs and a range of other psychic phenomena which appear to defy physical explanation. The starting point of our discussion was an essay that presented the dualist concept as a fact, and it was this presumption that I objected to, just as I object to the presumption of materialists who claim that there is nothing beyond the physical.
 
Your last sentence, however, causes me problems. You say the brain helps “you”, but the brain is just as capable of hindering “you” - through age, disease, drugs. If it can help, hinder or change “you”, how can we be sure that it does not actually make “you”? Do "you" command it, or does it command “you”? Materialists will claim it's the latter. And so once again your admission that “we do not know how it works” may be turned into “we do not know what is at work.” -dhw: Perhaps, after all this discussion, you could remind us just why “kind” rather than “degree” is so important to you.-DAVID: Just following Adler's approach: Difference in Kind means we are specially created. His book explains all of this.-I am sure you are perfectly capable of defending your own beliefs without constantly referring to Adler. What you have said seems to me to indicate that this is an agenda-based notion essential for an anthropocentric theory of special creation which involves some weird convolutions for those who accept that we and our ape cousins are descended from a common ancestor. In the rest of my last post, while acknowledging the huge superiority of our mental capacity over theirs, I emphasized the comparatives that highlight degree not kind, and your own acknowledgement that our fellow animals have “a degree of immaterial thought” simply reinforces the argument that we have a greater degree of it than they do.