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

by dhw, Tuesday, October 25, 2016, 12:14 (2733 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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.

Ensoulment means endowing the body with a soul, so of course it requires a body. You have agreed that your consciousness and your self are inseparable. According to you, your self is not your brain but your conscious soul, since that apparently will survive when your body dies. You now have your conscious soul controlling your brain and its functions, but one of your brain’s functions is to manage your conscious soul. Unless managing differs from controlling, this does not make sense to me.

However, if we drop “manage”, I think I can see a way forward. If your dualism is true, your brain and senses provide “you” (your consciousness/soul/self) with information, which “you” process and then “you” instruct the brain to take any necessary actions. The information itself will have ongoing influence on “you”/ your consciousness etc., and in that sense we can say the brain provides experiences that may shape “you”. But it is not the brain “managing” consciousness.

This whole discussion began with your claim that your God created the larger brain, and then consciousness/the soul/the self learned how to use it – as opposed to the brain expanding in response to the demands of consciousness. I hope eventually to delve deeper into this with an approach that will reconcile dualism and materialism, but I need time!

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.
DAVID: 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.

What do you mean by “passage”? As we both keep repeating, evolution advances perfectly well without the death of the least complex species (single-celled). “Less adequate” ones dying out merely confirms the Darwinian process of natural selection. It doesn’t explain why your God preprogrammes “inadequate” solutions in the first place. What we now have is your God preprogramming or dabbling all the successes and all the failures. I did not say there was anything right or wrong about evolution – I’m trying to understand how it works, and why it produced the great higgledy-piggledy of extinct organisms and the extant duckbilled platypus, mosquito, weaverbird with its nest, and humans.

dhw: We both disagreed with Wagner, so I don’t know why you have brought him up again.
DAVID: 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.

I doubt if many evolutionists would oppose the view that evolution takes place through the use of flexible genetic codes which can produce a vast variety of patterns. We don’t need Wagner to tell us that, do we? He thinks it’s all laid on by Nature, and you think it’s all laid on by God.