A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE chemical problems (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, August 05, 2018, 12:43 (2301 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You keep accusing me of separating the soul from "me", whereas this is precisely what you keep doing! If the soul IS you, you now have the soul BEING conscious and yet producing consciousness for the soul from the electricity the soul creates when the soul thinks? How can the soul think before consciousness has been produced?

DAVID: Doesn't conscious thought have a beginning? An analysis of the role of soul, if it exists, has to start by recognizing physical/material evidence. The material me thinks with the brain networks. Somehow conscious thought appears to me. Logically if the soul is the immaterial essence of me, the soul and material I initiate thought together.

There is no logic in this at all. Of course conscious thought has a beginning. And until a week or so ago, we agreed that if there was such a thing as the soul, the soul initiated it. The physical/material evidence of thought is its material expression. But you keep repeating the mantra that “you” think with or use the brain networks, and I keep asking you what function the brain performs besides information and expression, and you zoom all over the place with new theories about translation and copying and representing. Logically if the soul is the immaterial essence of you which survives the death of the brain, the soul must be the part of you that thinks, unless you believe that you stop thinking when you enter the afterlife.

DAVID: I view this relationship much as we have discussed quantum reality. Quantum mechanics is the basis of our reality, but somehow the quantum basis is on the other side of a wall of uncertainty so we live in reality but suspect there is another reality across the 'wall'. ( Remember Ruth Kastner) I view my soul in the same way, based on the discoveries that consciousness appears to control the results of quantum experiments as in the late choice findings. Yes, my soul is my essence, but there may well be a wall of separation as my soul may exist primarily in quantum reality but finds expression in this reality through its contact with my brain.

I wondered how long it would be before you wandered back to the murky quantum world. Of course your soul, if it exists, gives its thought material expression in this reality through its use of the brain. As for the “wall of separation”, you believe that when the brain dies, the soul will enter another reality, but by now calling this a “quantum reality” you change nothing in the argument!

DAVID: In this concept my soul is part of the quantum reality, which is the mind of God, which under girds the universe. When you follow this pattern thought, my view of what a soul might be makes sense. The immaterial quantum soul goes to the afterlife across the 'wall' to the quantum layer of reality where the afterlife exists.

Quantum this and quantum that tells us nothing about the role of the soul in life. On the assumption that your God’s mind is conscious, why can’t our part of his mind be conscious too? Why does it have to be a mechanism that works with the brain to produces electric waves before it can think? (Although you actually have it thinking with the brain in order to produce the waves, so it thinks before it can even produce thought!)

DAVID: Tell us your concept and we can critically study it. How do you view your essence acting?

dhw: I’m surprised that you can’t remember my concept of dualism (not to be taken as belief in dualism). The self consists of two components: the immaterial soul and the material body/brain. The soul, or the “essence” of me, comprises all my immaterial attributes such as consciousness, thought, emotion, will, memory etc. In life it acts by using the body/brain to gather information and to give its thoughts material expression. When the body/brain dies, it survives as the same immaterial “essence” of me, but it uses psychic means to gather information and to communicate.

DAVID: I know your definition. It doesn't include my considerations of the quantum portion of reality….

As above, your considerations of the quantum portion of reality do not explain the role of the soul in life, or offer us one single brain function beyond those of information and expression.

DAVID: ……or of how the soul might be the mechanism that produces consciousness from electricity.

Also as above, why can’t the piece of your God’s mind be conscious, just as it is when apparently it hops over the “wall of uncertainty” to rejoin its source?

DAVID: Note that Penrose has a theory about quantum activity intrinsic in the brain. Thought occurs only in the brain in reality. All analyses of the possible existence of a soul and how it functions must begin with that fact.

We have agreed that if the soul exists, it is situated “in the brain in reality”. That does not help us to understand its FUNCTION. The possible existence of a soul depends on your belief (a) that the brain is NOT a mechanism for consciousness, and (b) that there is an afterlife, or “quantum reality”, in which your immaterial, consciously thinking essence survives the death of the material you.