Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 12:40 (2354 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Dualists like yourself normally believe that the two entities perform different FUNCTIONS in life, the soul being a “separate consciousness mechanism” which works with your body (brain), using the information your body supplies, and using the body (brain) to express or implement your thoughts. In death this same “separate consciousness mechanism” – your soul which has created the thoughts – survives and continues to create its thoughts, but now uses different methods (“operates by a different form”) to acquire information and to express/implement those thoughts. In life and in death the dualist’s soul remains the same “you”, performing the same function of thinking, feeling, remembering etc. That is the “static” element – you remain you.

DAVID: I can accept this.

dhw: Then why do you keep rejecting it? (See above and below).

DAVID: But what I accept is your statement: (“operates by a different form”), which I state is saying it operates one way in life and different way in death. Do you mean what I mean?

You keep accepting and then rejecting the WHOLE of the above description of dualism. It is the SAME “separate consciousness mechanism” (soul), but it “operates” – i.e. observes and expresses/implements its thoughts – differently in life and in death.

DAVID: There is our difference! The soul uses the brain circuits in life but can think on its own in death (from NDE evidence). Two forms of ability to think.

Once more: You keep agreeing and then disagreeing that the dualist’s soul is “a separate conscious mechanism” which does the thinking and which remains itself after death, but which “uses the brain circuits in life” to acquire information and to express/implement its thoughts materially. This is not two forms of “ABILITY TO THINK”! There is one ability to think, and two different worlds in which it operates and therefore uses two different means of operation. Your argument results in you now having the SAME piece of your God’s consciousness (i.e. the SAME ability to think, i.e. the SAME “separate conscious mechanism”) – which even returns to your God – unable to think without a brain but able to think without a brain, not separate from the brain but separate from the brain, dependent on the brain but not dependent on the brain.

DAVID: We remain apart. A larger brain allows the soul to have more complex thought. It is possible God had the brain generate its own consciousness.

Thank you. That is the only way you can reconcile your dualism with your materialistic belief that the soul depends on the brain for its “more complex thought”.

DAVID: If He is reaching in that way, why not just gift part of His own universal consciousness when a new brain appears?

How do you think he “just gifts” it? Does he attend the birth of every brained organism? Or (theistic version of my proposal) is his gift of consciousness generated by the brain which, like every other part of the body, stems from material genetics, i.e. does not require any action on his part when a new brain appears?