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

by David Turell , Monday, October 24, 2016, 15:21 (2734 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I manage my consciousness through the instrument of my brain, which receives consciousness for me to mold as myself. My brain is material managing a non-material consciousness.

“I” = your self. But if your brain “manages the consciousness, shapes its knowledge and experiences and sense of self”, it is the brain that fashions your self! It should be the other way round if you believe in a disembodied self (your “soul”): your immaterial soul should manage your brain, which would then be the material instrument that implements the soul’s instructions.

Ensoulment requires a living body, which becomes disembodied at death. I control my brain and its functions, one of which is to provide for management of consciousness which I shape in my image during life.

dhw: So your God provides choices to solve every single problem for the next 3.7 billion years, and those that are inadequate for a particular problem are not wrong. That'll be a nice consolation for those who have to say goodbye.

Evolution only advances with the passage of less adequate and less complex species. Death makes room for the living. Nothing 'wrong' about evolution. It produced us.

dhw: Wagner thinks life itself and the evolutionary mechanism were the result of a “happy accident” and “innovative solutions to selective pressures… are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it.” As you say, all “natural”, whereas you see every innovative solution as the result of planning. We both disagreed with Wagner, so I don’t know why you have brought him up again.

Because I take bits and pieces from other folk's ideas and I see in his approach to patterns a possible path to understanding how God did His engineering of evolution through genetic codes and patterns in codes.