Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 21, 2018, 12:23 (2284 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: ...But those signals are not thought itself until the consciousness mechanism translates back to the immaterial side as words in my head.

dhw: And this is where your theory becomes incomprehensible to me. How can the soul think if it doesn’t have thoughts? Of course the signals are not thought itself: thought is thought itself. The English-speaking soul is conscious (as it is in NDEs), and so it thinks conscious thoughts inside your head (until you have no head). Once more: why does the soul have to translate its English words into electricity and then translate the electricity back into the English words it thought in the first place? Please answer.

DAVID: I've answered over and over. Your soul is not separate from you as you exist in your material body. You think with your brain! Thought does not appear until you desire to initiate it and then we can see it in fMRI and electric waves. Remember evidence of no consciousness is a flat EEG during NDE's. You and your soul obviously think with brain waves as the container of the thoughts. You keep separating your soul from your brain. What do you think the EEG represents?

We cannot “see” thoughts in electric waves. We see electric waves! If you and I have such a thing as a soul, it thinks in English, and that is the whole point of using NDEs as evidence. That is when the soul DOES separate from the body, and the flat EEG "represents" the case for thought without a brain. The brain is not functioning, and yet the English-speaking patient is able to observe and think in English. So how can NDEs possibly support your inexplicable and illogical theory that the English-speaking soul cannot think until its English thoughts are translated into electric brain waves which it then translates back into English?

dhw: I am trying to explain my objections to your various theories. Perhaps one day we
shall return to my own, and you will explain your objections to that.

DAVID: Your theories skip over the material I present about child/brain development which show how the child/soul develop their use of the brain. I know it is the material side of the problem.

dhw: My one theory incorporates the “material side of the problem”: the brain is the source of consciousness and thought, and as agreed above, the child is a blank (other than through its inborn characteristics) until the brain is mature enough to absorb information and then to instruct the rest of the (developing) body to express its thoughts materially. My theory in the context of child/brain development is the same as yours, except that the “soul” (if it exists) is the product of the brain through a process I have described under THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE.

DAVID: Your theory is pure materialism.

First you objected to my theory because it didn’t tackle brain development in a child. I have dealt with that, and so now you object because the theory incorporates the “material side of the problem” by (theistic version) having your God design a mechanism (the brain) that creates immaterial consciousness and thought which in turn may - a carefully chosen auxiliary verb - BECOME the soul. This is not “pure” materialism; it is a way of reconciling materialism with dualism.

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