Big brain evolution: brain size and intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 21:13 (2416 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You said that in life it was a material quantum mechanism. You have agreed that in death your s/s/c is still you: NDE patients, whose brains are non-functional, are aware of what is happening around them, whether in the operating theatre or in another world, and when it’s the latter they can communicate and even express their own wishes (some do not want to return). Clearly the mechanism for consciousness in death has to interact differently with its new surroundings (e.g. using telepathy), but are you now saying that although it retains all the attributes (thought, memory, emotion etc.) it had when inside the brain, it suddenly becomes an immaterial quantum construct? Is there such a thing? If there is, why would your God need to manufacture a material one? Why wouldn’t the immaterial one perform the same thinking/remembering/feeling functions inside the brain as outside it, and as we have agreed over and over again, use the brain simply to gather information and give material expression and implementation to its thoughts?

DAVID: I view a purely quantum mechanism as pure quantum energy in an immaterial form. This is why we have had so many discussion of quantum reality and trying to understand the uncertainty of how we view it and try to understand it. Quantum reality underlies our universe and is the basis of it in my view. God's consciousness is quantum reality, pure energy, and we have a portion of it in our brains where it interfaces with the living us.

dhw: But you wrote: “…what I am describing is a proposed material quantum mechanism in the brain which facilitates the brain to have consciousness and produce thought. That mechanism is a gift from God's universal consciousness. This is dualism in a different form from yours.” (My bold) Prior to the entry I have reproduced above, I asked if this meant God gave us a material quantum mechanism (which might just as well be called the brain), and if God’s own consciousness was also a material quantum mechanism. It now appears that you are only referring to an immaterial quantum mechanism in both cases, which I’m afraid takes us straight back to Square One. You believe in an immaterial self which resides within and interacts with the material brain in life and leaves it in death. I suggest to you that in a dualist’s life this immaterial self (or “pure quantum energy”) does the thinking, while the material self provides the information and material expression and implementation of those thoughts. You keep agreeing and then disagreeing, so may I ask which it is now?

Think back to our discussion about what was in the beginning before the Big Bang: God as pure energy with no material form was my opinion. That is what I view now as God's universal consciousness, of which we have a portion to interface with our brain to produce immaterial thought. Our personality/s/s/c is a construct built from birth in that interface. Both this consciousness mechanism and brain must work together to produce thought in life. The immaterial self cannot by itself produce or even drive immaterial thought unless interlocked with the material brain during life. I can control my consciousness only by employing my brain, typing these words which are a material implementation of immaterial response thoughts.