Different in degree or kind: Sapiens begin brain use (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 20, 2016, 07:23 (2957 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: What you call “our ability to use our brain” IS our consciousness. Your belief in free will is precisely your belief that your consciousness controls your brain, not the other way round.
DAVID: Not my concept. I view my brain like a radio receiver, which I can turn it on by my free will as I do my own individual thinking and mold my personality through experience and analysis of my thoughts. I decide what to think and what to conclude. Consciousness is an non-material instrument I use

What do you think your ”I” consists of? If you believe it will survive the death of your body, you can’t separate it from your consciousness, unless you think you are going to be “you” without knowing who “you” are. Every immaterial attribute of your identity – your thoughts, emotions, memories, experiences, free will, personal characteristics – must be bound up with your consciousness.

You have summed it up perfectly in your response to the article on self and soul: “What is continuous is our consciousness in which our 'self' develops.” Exactly. But you go on: “we have a continuous self which maintains itself from birth to death.” This is the point at which you disagree with yourself, because according to your dualistic beliefs, the self – or the consciousness in which your self develops – continues after death. And yet you conclude: “This is what consciousness does for us, a mighty tool managed by the brain.” How can consciousness be managed by the brain if the consciousness that contains your “self” survives the death of the brain?

DAVID: Yes, my concept of guidelines includes the limitations or boundaries of invention.
dhw: No disagreement here. Autonomy does not mean that you can do anything you like! It means that when an organism takes a decision, camouflages itself, builds a nest, it is not preprogrammed or dabbled with or guided. And so either the organism does the inventing or your God does it. No wishy-washy in-betweens.
DAVID: Not sure of your exact meaning. I start with the concept that God guides evolution, but my concept of His method has more than one possibililty as previously explained.

You have only given us two possible methods: preprogramming and dabbling. Each of these precludes autonomy. The only guidelines you have come up with are limitations, but these do not explain what an organism CAN do; they only tell us what an organism can’t do. You have previously mentioned God giving organisms a multichoice list, with the organism free to choose, and bad luck if it got the answer wrong. That would mean that God not only provided the first cells with programmes for every innovation and natural wonder in life’s history, but also got them to pass on multiple wrong programmes as well. I hope that idea has gone into the bin now. What other guidelines can you think of that might enable us to call the inventive mechanism inventive as opposed to automatic?