A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by dhw, Thursday, July 19, 2018, 12:33 (2318 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You keep forgetting there is a material and an immaterial side to this. I am describing what must happen on the material side: I/soul think with my brain. Somehow the wet ions (not really wet but surrounded by fat which keeps them dry) handle that thought and produce mental words I 'hear'.

You keep agreeing that your soul thinks in English, but now it is incapable of thinking in English and it is the electrical charges from your brain that “somehow” translate (“produce mental words”) the thought into English.

DAVID: That must happen somehow, because if we study the brain all we see is EEG electric waves. I'm simply proposing that my immaterial doppelganger soul has a mechanism that does all that translating from thought to ions to thought.

Simply? The electric waves take place in the brain. If an immaterial soul exists, then it does the thinking in English and the electric waves are the brain’s response to the thought. If it doesn’t exist, then the electric waves are the product of the brain’s English-speaking thinking activity. I’d call that “simple”, and there is no need for any “somehow” translation process.

DAVID: In death, which is certainly a change, the soul changes its mechanism to telepathy for handling thought.

Telepathy doesn’t “handle” thought. It sends thought from one person to another. On Tuesday you agreed with this:
dhw: In death, English-speaking soul continues to think intelligible thoughts in English, but uses psychic means to gather information and uses telepathy instead of brain in order to communicate with others.
It’s all change on a Wednesday.

DAVID: Of course my soul thinks in English thru the agency of the wet ions.
dhw: What does “thru the agency” mean?
DAVID: […]Agency means mechanism. The soul translates from the electrical waves.

So here we have the English-speaking soul thinking its thought in English, and the electrical waves from the brain carry the thought to the soul so that the soul can translate it into English. Does this make any sense?

dhw: If you accept that the English-speaking soul continues to think intelligible thoughts in English, we can do away with the idea that in life it is incapable of thinking intelligible thoughts in English unless it puts them into wet ions which either translate them back into English (one version) or bring them back to the soul to get the soul to translate them back into English (the other version).

DAVID: I/soul has to think with my material brain. The thoughts go into ions and come back as thoughts. We KNOW this. You know it. The soul simply arranges the translations. That is a simple theory to understand.

I don’t know any such thing. I only know that there is a link between thought and electric waves. You believe you have a soul which in death is able to think without a brain. NDEs are regarded as evidence for this. Hence the belief that in life the soul does the thinking and uses the brain for information and material expression. THAT is a simple theory to understand. Now in your new theory you have the soul incapable of thinking without the brain, and so we have the various convolutions in which the soul thinks its thought in English, the thought becomes ions, and the ions become thought, which the soul translates into the English in which it started. Why don’t you go back to the simple process we began with: the dualist’s English-speaking soul (which lives inside the brain) thinks its English thought, and activates the brain (electrical waves) so that the brain can give the thought material expression? But if you believe that “wet ions produce intelligible thought” (your exact words), then you are a materialist. But see the next exchange for further confusion:

dhw: Materialism: the brain thinks. Mystery, as described in your post: we have no idea how electrical charges from within the brain create thought.

dhw: I’m sorry you didn’t comment on this, since you actually claim in one of your versions that “wet ions produce intelligible thought”.

DAVID: By the working soul’s translation.

So in this version it’s goodbye to the English-speaking soul as the initiator of thought, and it’s hello to the wet ions as thought producers, but if their thought only becomes intelligible through the soul’s translation of it, then the wet ions have produced UNintelligible thought. Do we really need any of this?

dhw: Now without going through the wet ions/translation theory again, please simply tell me which of the above points you disagree with.
DAVID: Most of it.
dhw: So you reject the proposal that the dualist’s English-speaking soul uses information from the brain, initiates thoughts in English, and sends messages to the brain to give its thoughts material expression.
DAVID: You won't accept my translation theory.

Neither version of your translation theory makes any sense at all to me. Meanwhile, do you reject the above proposal?