A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, April 29, 2018, 12:36 (2399 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If the brain expresses the s/s/c thoughts as it does, if diseased it does it in garbled fashion, obviously.

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”?

DAVID: 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.

Your first comment distinguishes between thought and expression, and tells us the thought has obviously been “garbled”, which means it was different from what the brain expressed. Your answer now is that a sick brain gives rise to “deranged” thought, which means that the brain produces thought, and not that the s/s/c produces thought which is expressed by the brain. But later you also say: “A diseased brain always can change the expression of the s/s/c thoughts.” Within two posts you switch from being a dualist to being a materialist to being a dualist.

dhw: 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.)
DAVID: 5 January is the same discussion.

5 January has nothing to do with the sick brain. It tries to reconcile materialism and dualism by seeing consciousness as energy. It covers Penrose’s theory, emergence, Sheldrake’s morphic fields, and the possibility of a dualistic “soul”.

dhw: My limit here is to resolve the apparent dichotomy between dualism and materialism. […] 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.

DAVID: 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.

Thank you. I am only asking you to accept the logic behind my hypothesis, which apparently you now do, but of course you don’t have to believe it.

Thank you for the article on psychedelic drugs. Clearly chemicals can change the s/s/c, and your comment could hardly be more appropriate: “The issue of dualism is never simple.” It is certainly not simple if you think the s/s/c is a bit of God’s own s/s/c. But it is perfectly simple if you accept the hypothesis that the s/s/c is produced by materials. And you can still believe in an immortal soul, as I attempted to show in my post of 5 January under "Reconciling materialism and dualism".