Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 13:07 (2158 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Yes, even though it’s the same thinking you, it must operate differently, as agreed above. We don’t know how a bodiless soul observes and communicates, but if you think it has something to do with quantum mechanics, which nobody understands, that’s fine with me. It doesn’t resolve the total confusion I have summarized above, in which you have the same “piece of God’s consciousness” unable to think without a brain until it has no brain to think with, or maybe it doesn’t even think at all (zombies in heaven).

DAVID: We are at the same disagreement point. All I am proposing is that if the soul uses the brain in life and doesn't have it in death it can maintain the same personality construct but work by an altered mechanism.

There is no disagreement. Your comment is a precise echo of mine: “...even though it’s the same thinking you, it must operate differently.” In dualistic life, the soul is the thinking you, and operates by using the brain to gather information and give material expression/implementation to its thoughts. In an immaterial world the SAME thinking you gathers information and gives expression/implementation to its thoughts by different, unknown means. In both cases, thinking is done by the immaterial soul.

dhw: You still haven’t offered a single objection to the logic of this proposal, which resolves the logical split (summarized above) which you have acknowledged in your own thinking. You prefer to focus on the obvious fact that immaterial observation and communication must be different from material observation and communication.

DAVID: You have summarized our difference. Your point is logical from the position that the soul imposes thought on the brain, and I say the soul is implanted on the brain and must use its networks to think. As always, my dualism is not your dualism.

The soul being implanted on the brain is certainly dualism. The soul using the brain’s networks to provide information and to implement its thoughts is also dualism. The soul being dependent on the brain for its ABILITY TO THINK (as illustrated by your insistence that the brain had to be enlarged before it could THINK of new concepts) is materialism. The soul being dependent on the brain for its ability to think, and then not being dependent on the brain for its ability to think, is neither one nor the other, or both mixed into all the contradictions and confusions I keep pointing out. I have offered a theory to make the mixture possible, and so far you have not come up with any logical loopholes in my theistic version of it.