Immunity: detecting dangerous bacteria (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 26, 2017, 13:38 (2555 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We are still in full agreement about souls. The parenthetic 'soul' simply was a reminder that the brain was the operating point for the soul. I accept God's consciousness is everywhere, but only brains 'receive' useful consciousness with which they can functionally think.

dhw: I don’t know about “accept”. You believe your God’s consciousness is everywhere, except apparently in bacteria, which are automatons that have no idea what they’re doing, and in immune cells, which learn about bacteria by experience and change their DNA to fit their discoveries but are also automatons, because without a brain apparently nothing can be autonomously intelligent. I don’t know how you distinguish between consciousness and “useful” consciousness, and I don’t know how brains can “functionally think” if the thinking is done by the “soul”. And I still don’t understand how consciousness (autonomous intelligence, the soul) “exists separate” from the brain (see first quote above), can even live on when the brain is dead, but cannot exist without a brain. In brief, your response is somewhat confusing.

DAVID: I'm not confused. Consciousness is received by the brain which the soul/consciousness uses to think.

“Uses to think”? Let’s clarify: the brain supplies information to the soul (so the soul uses the information), and then the soul uses the brain to make the body give physical expression to the thought, e.g. by action in the form of movement, speech etc. How does that enable the brain to “functionally THINK”?

DAVID: NDE's show the ability to separate and rejoin and that a soul/consciousness can function without a functional brain.

If the soul/consciousness can function without a brain (as in the afterlife you believe in), it means that consciousness does not need a brain, and yet you continue to insist than an organism without a brain can’t be conscious.

DAVID: In my view consciousness can only exist in brains which are the only living matter that can receive it. And, of course, God can engineer anything to look intelligent with genome programming.

“Consciousness can only exist in brains”, and yet “consciousness can function without a functional brain” (and in the afterlife, without a brain of any kind). But you are not confused. Ah well, since you so often accidentally tell us that the brain thinks (you’ve done it twice more on the “learning new tasks” thread), how about this for a hypothesis: consciousness is NOT possible without certain chemical processes (materialism). In the animal world these take place within the brain. In other organisms such as bacteria the chemical processes take place within the cell itself, in its equivalent of a brain.

And here’s another hypothesis: if something learns by experience, alters its own DNA in order to cope with changing conditions, looks intelligent, and acts intelligently, then maybe it is intelligent.