Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 20, 2018, 15:36 (2379 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The frontal cortex is the seat of consciousness. It receives all sensory information from elsewhere in the brain, those you have listed, but also smell, proprioception, touch, and internal sensations, etc. In NDE's the memories do not need any of those areas of perception.They do see and learn. You insist thinking remains the same in both states.

dhw: You are repeating my argument as if somehow it supports you! I keep saying that in life the dualist’s brain supplies information and implements the thoughts of the dualist’s “soul”. Now you tell us the brain supplies information. In NDEs there is no brain, and yet the “soul” learns, remembers, feels, thinks, takes decisions etc. So why would it not have the same function in life?

How do you know the afterlife soul does all those things? We have no evidence other Than NDE's descriptions. The episodes describe seeing and observing. "I'd like to stay, no, you have to go back", indicates no soul controls of activity. Afterlife can be nothing like living. Two veru different states for the soul.

DAVID: In life the soul may have to use the brain networks to think or it may not.

dhw: If the “soul” is a piece of God’s consciousness, as you believe, and if there are TWO parts of the self, is not reasonable to assume that the role of God’s consciousness is to be the conscious part of the self, which then retains its consciousness when the material part dies?

Those are your 'ifs'. The material brain is not part of the soul.

DAVID: You are the one who demands an unchanging soul from life to death.

dhw: I don’t demand it. If there is such a thing as a “soul” that survives death, NDEs show that it is the SAME person in death as in life.

Same person different functions. Afterlife does not require the same functions as in life, only thought and observation although no sensory organs are available.

DAVID: If God gifts it as brain software in a quantum pure form, the weirdness of quantum mechanism might solve the transition easily. The quantum facet of my entries is to make the point that quantum mechanism is the basis of all we understand and don't understand.

dhw: Whether you call the “soul” a “quantum” this, that and the other, or “a piece of God’s consciousness”, makes no difference. The “soul”, according to NDEs, is still the same thinking person. That is why it is illogical to claim that the soul depends on the brain for its ability to think, UNLESS you accept that the brain is the source of thought and might produce a form of energy that can survive its own death (again, see “Reconciling materialism and dualism”).

You refuse to accept that there are two logical possibilities for brain soul relationship to start a logical discussion. Your 'unless' sentence is pure materialism.

DAVID: I repeat: it is more likely to me that God supplies a software to the brain which must use the hardware to think. I've simply made a logical choice of two possibilities. And you say that is my dualism.

dhw: You also believe that the software can do its thinking without the hardware when there isn’t any hardware. You have acknowledged this logical split in your thinking, but you call your choice logical.

I've explained it by stating the soul mechanism is different in life and in death. Immaterial in both states. Same person, your point to say the soul is unchanged is dealing with wholly immaterial concepts: 'personage' and soul. I believe they are at a quantum level and couterintuitive, with changing mechanism forms. Again the reason why I present quantum mechanics as the basis for the universe. Same personage does not require the same quantum substrate.