Big brain evolution: brain size and intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell @, Friday, March 30, 2018, 15:00 (2181 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: No glimmer of light. You accept my point of view that the the s/s/c is required in life to use the brain to create and express thought. But the s/s/c is also the living me and is not separate from me.

dhw: No, I do not accept the view in your second sentence. Dualism means that the s/s/c CREATES thought, and uses the receiver brain to express/implement it. Yes, the living “me” is the thinking s/s/c, and you believe that it survives the death of the brain. Therefore the brain cannot be the creator of thought.

Yes, but thought is created by use of the material brain, and in life cannot be done without it. I don't think we differ.


DAVID: I am a material me managing to create an immaterial structure of my personality starting at birth.

dhw: If you believe that the material you creates your immaterial personality, you are a materialist. In your dualistic guise, you even tell us that the consciousness of the s/s/c is part of your immaterial God’s immaterial consciousness, i.e. it is not a product of the material self.

My theory of dualism is not yours. I must use my brain to think, using my consciousness as a gift from God which allows thought.


DAVID: In life the s/s/c cannot think without the functional brain to use. The s/s/c can only think without a brain when it changes form in NDE's or death, two different realities. This view is not inconsistent with my position that bigger brains have better thoughts, when used by the s/s/c to create them controlled by living personalities of earlier forms.

dhw; NDEs and the belief in a soul that lives on after death are integral to the concept of dualism, i.e. that IN LIFE there are two separate elements that work together: the soul and the body; the mind and the brain. There is no dualism in death (indeed there may be nothing at all in death), and if bigger brains have better thoughts, then there is no dualism in life. Yes, the s/s/c uses the brain. As you acknowledged in the two quotes above, it uses the brain to IMPLEMENT its thoughts, not to create them. And yes, the s/s/c IS the living personality, which dualists believe is the immaterial living, conscious, THINKING “me” which survives death.

Here we seem to agree.


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