Consciousness: and brain damage (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 10, 2018, 10:48 (2507 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: And I will insist they are programmed by God to act automatically intelligently

dhw: “Automatically intelligently” is another of your obfuscations which needs to be clarified. Either the cells are automatons that have been programmed with each and every one of their responses and therefore do not require even one iota of autonomous intelligence, or they have been endowed (perhaps by God) with autonomous intelligence which they naturally use when confronted with new problems.

DAVID: I chose the first of your theories as you well know. The second involves the ability for independent thought without any sign of brain function being present in a cell.

A cell can hardly show brain function if it hasn’t got a brain. We normally judge intelligence by the ability of organisms to act intelligently, and if they are able to solve new problems, some of us would take that as a sign that they know what they’re doing. Any dualist who claims that intelligence is impossible without a brain is arguing against himself. Hence the continued confusion exemplified by your next comment:

DAVID: […] the brains suddenly enlarged in each new stage and then the products of that new-sized brain appeared. That sequence tells us the new cortex could produce new thoughts and concepts, whereas the smaller brain could not.

But according to you, the cortex does NOT produce thoughts and concepts! You keep forgetting that you are a dualist! However, if the cortex is indeed the producer of thoughts – materialist view, which may well be correct – it is perfectly feasible that individual old cortexes produced new thoughts and concepts (you don’t seem to recognize that just like sapiens some individual hominids might have been cleverer than others), but these required additional abilities for their implementation, and so just as the illiterate women’s brains rewired themselves IN RESPONSE to new concepts, the pre-sapiens brain expanded IN RESPONSE to the need for new abilities, i.e. the implementation of the concept was the cause of the expansion.

DAVID: The mental processes are biochemical processes at the base of consciousness functioning. But they are the living wet hardware!

Once again, you the dualist are telling us that mental processes are biochemical!

DAVID: You keep refusing to accept my analogy that the brain is used as a computer by the s/s/c and for the living person, the brain is the access to the s/s/c. After death that connection is not required.

The computer analogy leads to nothing but confusion. What is your dualistic self/soul/consciousness if it’s not the living person? So apparently the brain is the living person’s means of access to the living person. What does that mean? If the s/s/c is NOT confined to biochemical processes (your dualism), then mental processes are NOT biochemical processes, and no amount of obfuscation with computer analogies can disguise this contradiction! (See “learning new tasks” for yet more computer obfuscations).