A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 17:55 (2355 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Still smells like pure materialism to me. Photon light waves carry immaterial information but photon light waves themselves are something real.

dhw: A theory that allows for the existence of God and for the survival of an immaterial form of conscious energy can hardly be called “pure materialism”. You seem to have almost cottoned on to the dualistic analogy I have offered, except that I am referring to the material realities (sun, stars, bus) that have produced the photons that carry the immaterial information.The bus and the theoretical physicist were real. Millions of years later, the accident can still be seen. The immaterial image survives the disappearance of the material reality that produced it, and this may be the case with the soul (hence ghosts and déjà vu), possibly extending to the soul continuing to think (but that is a matter of faith).

DAVID: I see the sun nine minutes after the light left it. I make the assumption it is still there when I see it. You theory is still having immaterial information produced by a material object, the sun. No real explanation for consciousness except pure materialism.

dhw: That is precisely the point of my analogy! Just as the material sun produces immaterial information which (theoretically) can go on existing indefinitely, the material brain produces the immaterial soul which (theoretically) can go on existing indefinitely. I am not trying to explain consciousness. I am trying to reconcile materialism and dualism!

All you are presenting is pure materialism, not a reconciliation.