Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 21, 2018, 17:18 (2284 days ago) @ dhw

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?

dhw: We cannot “see” thoughts in electric waves. We see electric waves!

Of course waves, which represent the thoughts. How they do that is the problem of consciousness.

dhw: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?

You have avoided the point that you are your soul. In life you think along with your soul using the brain. Therefore your soul uses the same mechanism as you. As for NDE's, I don't envision a soul with a rigid, one type mechanism for observation and thought. It has one method in life and another in death. NDE folks only know about their event when their brain wakes up and receives the soul's input back into brain waves which they recognize as new conscious information. In life the brain waves must be used to present thought.

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.

dhw: 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.

But your theory is bottom up: a material brain from God creates immaterial consciousness. If consciousness comes from a material brain it is purely a materialism theory. If God adds consciousness from His universal consciousness, then we are back to true dualism.