A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 28, 2018, 19:03 (2403 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: So when the addict or drunkard bashes his beloved wife’s brains out, is his s/s/c telling him to kiss her but the message gets garbled? And when the demented mother asks: “Who is that man?” is her soul saying: “There’s my son”?

The s/s/c is not separate from the brain, as you obviously like to imagine it. A sick brain will give rise to deranged thought and nothing else.
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DAVID: You miss the point that the s/s/c is firmly welded to the brain and cannot operate properly if the brain is sick or non-functional. […]

dhw: Not a good image - you can’t “firmly weld” something immaterial! The material and immaterial interact and are interdependent. You say that the immaterial thinking s/s/c has its “home” in the material brain, and the latter cannot express the thoughts of the s/s/c properly if it is sick. So the s/s/c IS operating properly, but its thoughts get “garbled”. See above for the implications.

Again, you have the s/s/c floating around, interacting but independent. It isn't. It is firmly part of the brain as its software. I've dealt with schizophrenics. They can't help themselves escape from their strange ideations. But chemicals can straighten out the brains chemical derangement. Just as lithium helps the bipolar.

dhw: My “theory” is not to prove that bacteria are autonomously intelligent, but to use that 50/50 possibility in order to resolve the apparent dichotomy between dualism and materialism, in which our brain changes our “soul” (through drugs, diseases) but our “soul” changes our brain (complexification, enlargement). If we accept that our thoughts and the implementation of our thoughts all stem from the same material source, the dichotomy disappears: the cell community is divided up to perform different functions – just like ants. Diseases and drugs may change the thinking part as well as the implementing part of the material community. I do not see why diseases and drugs should change an immaterial segment of your God’s consciousness. (But see my post of 5 January on “Reconciling materialism and dualism” concerning the immaterial “soul” that may or may not emerge from the materials.)

5 January is the same discussion. A diseased brain always can change the expression of the s/s/c thoughts.

dhw: My hypothesis resolves the above dichotomy, allows for the existence of your God and even for a soul that lives on […]. Theistically, it amounts to your God doing what humans have tried to do for centuries: invent a mechanism that can think for itself. So apart from the fact that it doesn’t fit in with your fixed beliefs, please tell me what flaws you can find in its logic.

DAVID: I don't see a solution at all. You are faced with explaining the arrival of the human brain, which is totally unnecessary for survival. You cannot separate the issue of consciousness from the arrival of consciousness, which you have just tried to do. The whole issue is a constellation of facts and factors. There are the issues of both how and why it all happened that must be considered. Your tentative accepting God solves nothing. Nor does isolating it from all we do know. It is logical only if confined by your limits.

dhw: My limit here is to resolve the apparent dichotomy between dualism and materialism. When we discuss how evolution works, our limit is the discussion about how evolution works. In both cases, purely for the sake of argument, I am quite happy to say “God did it”, because the matter under discussion is “WHAT was done?” In this case, did your God inject a bit of his s/s/c into each of us, or did he invent a material machine which could produce its own s/s/c? Now please tell me what flaws you find in the logic of the latter proposal.

I agree with you that God could have made a material brain that could produce immaterial thoughts on its own or He gave us a bit of His own s/s/c. I prefer the latter since I think the universe exists in His universal consciousness. And the NDE's solidify my position. I accept them as real.