Simon Conway Morris on animal intelligence (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 19, 2017, 13:06 (2865 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: If you really think the brain is the receiver, then it is consciousness and not the brain which develops new thoughts and concepts. That is dualism. It is materialists who argue that the consciousness which provides the new thoughts and concepts comes from the enlarged brain. It certainly is a tangle, simply because we don’t know the source of consciousness. However, it is a different tangle from your belief that consciousness comes from the brain and does not come from the brain.
DAVID: Look at the biology of the brain as it develops in the newborn baby as it explains my view. The baby is born and knows how to breathe. It knows how to suckle. It feels the urge to pee and poop and does. Its organs work automatically and are run by lower centers in the hypothalamus controlling pulse rate, respirator rate, etc. The higher centers in the frontal and pre-frontal cortex slowly develop as the infant experiences the world and gradually becomes the receiver for consciousness.

Up until this last sentence, everything is fine. A great factual account of all the automatic physical processes. But suddenly we depart from science, and consciousness magically appears and is “received” by the brain.

DAVID: It learns to use its consciousness which becomes molded to its personality by the plasticity of the brain manipulating the consciousness.

This sounds impressive, but what does it mean? How does the plastic (= mouldable) brain shape the plastic (= mouldable) consciousness into a personality? Does the physical brain tell the dualist’s immaterial, conscious mind to be mean and rough and to instruct it to punch Daddy on the nose? Materialists will probably tell you it does.

DAVID: It is an active back and forth activity to develop personality and to learn thought processes. Your thinking in the above paragraph is totally confused as you compartmentalize the brain and consciousness as totally separate. They are in one sense but they are not.

My paragraph explains the two different approaches (dualist and materialist). Your attempt to make brain and consciousness separate but not separate is what causes the confusion. (See below.) According to NDEs, which you claim to be the scientific evidence for your dualism, the conscious identity does exist separately from the brain. Materialists tell us that this is impossible. But I have not taken sides, because I do not claim to know the source of consciousness.

DAVID: The brain and its received consciousness work as smoothly together as a well-oiled machine would. I control my consciousness completely, because I am allowed to under this arrangement. Yes, I am a dualist, but the brain and consciousness work as one!

“Working smoothly together” does not make the dualist’s brain the “developer of new thoughts and concepts”. If dualism is correct, then the brain is a tool of the conscious, immaterial mind. In other words, although it provides information (e.g. through the senses), the brain responds to the requirements of the mind, is not the source of the mind, does not “mold” the mind, and does not come up with thoughts and concepts. They work smoothly together, because so long as we have a physical body, the mind needs the brain. But according to NDEs the conscious, immaterial mind remains itself, independently of the brain, even after death.

However, if materialism is correct, the brain IS the mind, and all our thoughts are the result of teamwork within the cells of the brain. The “I” is the product of the brain and whatever has influenced the brain, and it will die with the brain. In both cases, the brain and consciousness work as one, but for the dualist they are separate and for the materialist they ARE one.