A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 01, 2018, 12:58 (2305 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God's consciousness is also me when I use it to create conscious thought. Your theory makes God consciousness gift to me independent of the brain. It is inconsistent.

dhw: Your piece of God’s consciousness, according to you, is your soul, which is "you". Your soul doesn’t use your soul to create conscious thought. Your soul creates conscious thought. In life it is not “independent” of the brain, because it needs the brain to provide information and material expression, and you have offered no other “use” except a translation theory, which mercifully keeps disappearing.

DAVID: Haven't you noticed I've changed my approach to the problem?

I’ve noticed that you change your approach every time I challenge your theory of the moment.

DAVID: I'm starting from recognizing the material side of the problem. I know with free will I initiate thought. And I now view my living soul as a immaterial portion of me that is a recording reflection of me which will move on to the afterlife.

What is your dualist’s “I”? Is it or is it not a combination of your immaterial soul and your material body? This latest theory makes your soul into nothing but a memory bank, and so it no longer initiates thought, no longer translates thought into waves, no longer thinks, feels, makes decisions etc., because that is done by “I”. The soul just records what “I” do. And the piece of God’s consciousness isn’t conscious but reflects and records what the “I” does. (But see my final comment below.)

DAVID: The electricity in the brain is the living material mechanism for thought formation. I am material and I produce thought in the brain . My proposal remains my immaterial soul has a way of creating consciousness out of electricity.

So the material “you” produces electricity which produces thought, although your soul – which a moment ago was merely a recording device – now creates consciousness, although in the previous sentence it was the material "you" that produced thought (which I would regard as inseparable from consciousness). This theory is as confusing as all the others. How about this for dualism: the immaterial soul produces thought, using the brain to provide information and to give its thought material expression? Too clear for you?

DAVID: In life I am in charge and my soul reflects immaterially. My soul provides the essence of the homeostasis of life's molecules activities including consciousness. Those molecules don't think and are constantly in action to maintain life which though the soul emerges as a living me.

If your dualist’s “I” consists of soul and body/brain, and the soul is a recording device, that leaves the body/brain in charge. Now the molecules’ activities apparently include consciousness, and the recording device balances them. Meaning? But the molecules’ activities which include consciousness don’t include thinking. Weird. I agree that the molecules are constantly in action to maintain life, but if the soul is just a reflection and recording of the living you, it plays no role in the formation of you, let alone in the production of thought. And that, surprise, surprise, is fine with me. It is what I have proposed in my “theory of intelligence”: that the brain produces thought (materialism), and what we call the soul is the image produced by the energy of the thinking brain – what you call the recording. (Just as we could see the crucifixion if we were looking through a telescope billions of miles away.) This would explain psychic phenomena such as ghosts and déjà vu, but of course it will not allow for further development in an afterlife, which is where faith comes in. At the current rate of your theorizing, we should have a deal in about a week’s time.