Big brain evolution: learning new tasks (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 12:55 (2402 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There is no confusion on my part. Dualism means TWO: one is material and the other immaterial, no matter how interdependent they are, and this two-ness only applies to life. Yes, I think in words (but I also have feelings, which are not words), and they are immaterial until I use my materials to speak them or write them. I don’t know what you mean by “implement the active thought to the living person”. If there is a “soul”, it is the source of the living person’s thought, and interacts with the living person’s material self in order to give material expression or implementation to their thoughts. Of course an immaterial soul in an immaterial world must operate differently but, as you have agreed in the past, you will still be “you” if there is an afterlife. “You” are then your thinking soul and – a point you steadfastly go on ignoring – it is NDEs, i.e. the experience of a separate thinking “you” or “soul”, that provides believers with their evidence for dualism in life, i.e. a thinking “soul” and a materially implementing brain/body.

DAVID: I don't ignore NDEs. I don't know where you got that idea. They are the reason I stick firmly to dualism. I agree with your review above. It is my insistence upon identifying how the parts of the brain the s/s/c interacts with that bothers you.

I didn’t say you ignored NDEs. What you ignore is the fact that they are used as evidence for the existence of TWO components in our living selves: 1) the immaterial “soul”, which is the thinking self and lives on, and 2) the material brain and body which gather information and express or implement thought. I am not in the least bothered by your identifying which parts of the brain the s/s/c interacts with. I am bothered by your insistence that your God had to expand pre-sapiens’ brain before pre-sapiens could come up with new ideas, which means that the soul depends on the brain to be able to think, which in turn directly contradicts the whole basis of your dualism.