Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Saturday, August 11, 2018, 09:26 (2294 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Our discussions under THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE bring out the utter confusion when you attempt to reconcile your belief in an immaterial soul with the materialism arising from your medical training. If only you would recognize this dichotomy, you would not have to keep coming up with all the different theories which you then have to discard.

dhw: I have no idea why Egnor avoids the subject of electricity (I'll take your word for it that he does), but if he believes in a conscious immaterial soul, what alternative is there to the explanation that the soul’s thoughts spark the electricity, as opposed to the materialist explanation that the electricity sparks the thoughts? I doubt if he would subscribe to your translation theory, which tried to have it both ways!

DAVID: I think the desire to think initiates thought as new original electrical activity in the brain. The electricity does not spark the thought, it appears as a representation of thought.

I don’t understand any of this. You make it sound as if your soul (if it exists) has no idea what it wants to think about! What is a “representation” of thought? Once again, either the brain’s electricity creates the thought (materialism), or the thought sparks the electricity (dualism).

It might help us to go back to concrete examples. The illiterate women wanted to learn how to read and write. As a consequence of their fulfilling this “desire”, the brain itself underwent changes. Here we have concrete evidence that thought engenders changes in the brain, which I presume are implemented by electricity. This can be taken as evidence for dualism. On the other hand, drugs and diseases have devastating effects on brain and behaviour, which can be taken as evidence for materialism. Hence the dichotomy you refuse to recognize.

DAVID: The point is to answer this question: in the presence of any thought why is there a new wave of electricity? For my view the soul/I are initiators of the electricity and the soul provides the conscious interpretation of the electricity as it appears in the brain. A longer version of I/soul think by using my brain.

Now you are back to your translation theory, which I’d hoped we’d seen the back of. If the soul sparks gibberish electricity in the brain and then translates the gibberish electricity (“consciously interprets it”) into meaningful thoughts, why on earth can’t it come up with its meaningful thoughts in the first place?

Under "brain complexity":

DAVID: A changed brain can change thought expression by altering the thought producing electric impulses.

If the electric impulses from the brain produce thought, then it’s not the expression of thought but the thought itself that is changed by changes in the brain. Pure materialism.