Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 12, 2018, 11:09 (2385 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You keep ignoring the explanation I have suggested! The control centre would have to create new connections to all the different areas. Lots of new connections in the centre, only a few in the other areas. The more connections, the more materials required, and hence expansion.
DAVID: Once again, all the basic areas exist in apes. The homo frontal lobes enlarged and you are correct more connective axons would go to the implmentation areas, but those fibers don't take up much room. you can't escape that the frontal lobers are the maim enlargement and created a base for consciousness.

Once again you have missed the point. If the frontal lobes are the “base”, they are the control centre, which means that the connections start there. ALL of them. Any new concept requires new connections, but these will join up with existing connections in the implementation areas. So it is the control centre that has to expand the most.

dhw: The rest of your post hinges on the same point: “True human consciousness requires the presence of a massively complex large brain for the s/s/c to think with in life.” I suggest we now abandon the term s/s/c (self/soul/consciousness) and confine ourselves to “soul” in the context of dualism. Materialists also have a self and consciousness. If we substitute “self” in your sentence, we have pure materialism: the self thinks with its brain. If we substitute “soul”, your dualistic argument seems to be that the soul can only think if it is inside a brain, except that it continues to think when there is no brain (NDEs, an afterlife). If we are kind, we might call that a paradox. We obviously can’t substitute “consciousness” here.

DAVID: But it sees now we are discussng the same point. Again I view the soul as God's implant on the brain He created. We have our soul having to use the brain in life and it leaves us in death and joins Him in the afterworld. It has two mechanism forms in the two states. Thus a damaged brain by illness, injury or drugs cannot formulate proper thoughts from the soul. It is not clear whether the soul thinks in garbled fashion because of a damaged brain, or the brain mishandles proper original thought from the soul. One is correct. This is how I see dualism.

A few days ago you dismissed your idea of the soul thinking “proper thoughts”, in favour of the first of these options (the soul’s thoughts are garbled). But of course this option supports materialism, so back you go to “it is not clear whether….” You say the soul has “two mechanism forms”. This needs clarification. If the soul is a separate entity (which you now claim in your answer to my THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE, though elsewhere you insist that in life it is not, contradicting your own software/hardware analogy), it remains the same in an afterlife as in life. It is the thinking/feeling immaterial section of identity which interacts with the material information-gathering, thought-implementing body in material life, and then lives on as itself, but in a different immaterial world. I would like to think that all your contradictions, which mirror the great dichotomy between dualism and materialism, are resolved by my theory, which inverts the usual basis of dualism, thereby reconciling it with materialism. But I would welcome the pinpointing of any flaws in its logic.