A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE chemical problems (Identity)

by dhw, Thursday, August 09, 2018, 10:53 (2297 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I/soul think with my brain…

dhw: Same old mantra: my soul thinks with (or “uses”) my brain, but you won’t tell us what the use is, other than for information and material expression.

DAVID: I don't understand what else you want. In life I use my brain to create thought. As me my soul does also.

You don’t want to understand what else I want. If the soul is conscious, as you keep saying it is (though then you keep saying that it isn’t), it must be able to think and therefore doesn’t need the brain to create consciousness/to think! It uses the brain for information and material expression (you can hardly disagree), and when I ask you what else it uses the brain for, you come up with theories which even you have to discard. Now you have come up with not knowing what I mean. (Most of your post simply goes on repeating the mantra, so I’ll leave those bits out.)

DAVID: In life I am in charge…

dhw: In charge means free will, and if I believed in dualism I’d say that free will is an attribute of the immaterial soul, not of the material body. Do you agree?

DAVID: I think my material body/ brain has free will.

That is a real surprise to me. Your body/brain now makes all the decisions. Frankly, if the soul can’t think without the brain, and if the brain makes the decisions, determines how intelligent we are (your Einstein example), and rearranges itself in order to preserve its powers of cognition (non-Egnor non-example of dualism), what do you need a soul for?

DAVID: I view the soul as an immaterial copy of me, existing along with me but on the quantum side of the wall of uncertainty. In the afterlife the soul return to the quantum realm where the afterlife is. But the soul and I are never separate or separated by the wall.

“You” (soul and body/brain) lead a strange life! There’s the material you doing all the thinking and making all the decisions (a copy can hardly do the thinking, can it?), and the immaterial copy of you hanging around inside the material you, but also at the same time it is “on the quantum side of the wall of uncertainty”, which can only mean that the quantum world is also inside the material you, unless you have two copies of you, one on this side of the wall (inside you) and the second on the other side (outside you). This is, to say the least, somewhat confusing. Anyway, when you die, the copy of you, which does nothing at all, is suddenly able to undergo and react to and think about the new experiences of the afterlife, chatting telepathically to old friends, remembering all the things which in its material days it couldn’t even influence (it had no will of its own) and learning new things. And these new things, in the case of NDEs, it can even tell the brain about when it returns to material life. Just imagine that – the copy educating the original. I’m afraid I find this theory totally bewildering.

DAVID: I separate life and death into two very different circumstances.

Surprisingly, so do I.

DAVID: The soul and I, as the same entity, use the brain to think in life, but the soul, lacking the living me, thinks and communicates telepathically, all in a quantum reality.

Back to the old mantra, except that it is now the copy of “you and you” that uses the brain to think. And you seem to have forgotten that the copy of you is helpless – it has no will of its own. However, we have already agreed that if there is such a thing as a conscious, thinking soul, it must use psychic and not material means to observe and communicate. But if the soul is not conscious and thinking – as is apparently now the case in material life, since it’s only a helpless copy – then I don’t see how it can suddenly become conscious and thinking in the afterlife, which has now changed its name to the more scientific-sounding quantum reality.

DAVID: By the way, Susan agrees with you and says if you accept that theory of yours about the soul you must accept God as existing.

I’m delighted to have Susan supporting my theory, which makes so much more sense than any of the multiple theories you have been proposing and discarding. And since I have no answer to the design theory – I cannot place faith in chance as the creator of all these complex mechanisms – I must accept the POSSIBILITY of God’s existence. But I find it equally difficult to place faith in the concept of an unknown, unknowable, all-knowing, all-powerful conscious mind that came from absolutely nowhere, created the vastness of the material and ever changing universe out of its own immaterial self…. In brief, I can’t solve one mystery by having faith in another mystery which, if anything, I find even more mysterious. That is the agnostic’s dilemma.