Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 22, 2018, 11:23 (2283 days ago) @ David Turell

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?

DAVID: You have avoided the point that you are your soul. In life you think along with your soul using the brain.

In life “you” are your soul and your body/brain. Your soul thinks, and uses your brain for information and material expression. In death “you” are your soul. You do not have a body/brain, and yet you are still the thinking "you" (if NDEs are to be believed). This is seen as evidence that the soul is the thinking part of "you" in life. Meanwhile, you still haven’t explained the logic of your theory that an English-speaking soul initiates thought but cannot think until its thoughts become electric waves which it then translates back into the English it started with in the first place.

DAVID: 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.

We have agreed that in life the soul (if it exists) uses the brain for observation and communication, but must use psychic means in death. Why must it have a different “mechanism” for thought? The only reason you have given is your belief in an illogical and inexplicable translation theory which depends on brain waves which don’t exist in death. Why can’t you stick to your original idea (repeated on the Egnor thread) that the soul is a piece of God’s consciousness – i.e. is the source of consciousness and thought – both in life and in death?

DAVID: 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.

How the heck does this work? Do you, who believe in a soul, really believe that when the NDE patient’s soul undergoes these experiences it doesn’t know what’s happening? What “input” can it have if it doesn’t know what happened? Now you have the soul experiencing an event but not knowing anything about it until it gets the brain to translate what it doesn’t know into electric waves, and then the soul translates the waves into knowledge of the event it experienced. Why must we have all these illogical convolutions? Here’s a straightforward alternative: the soul – the immaterial thinking, feeling, remembering part of yourself – returns to the reawakened brain, and then the patient is able to recount his/her experiences as a disembodied soul.

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.

DAVID: 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.

You’ve got it. My theory inverts the conventional concept of dualism, and that is how it reconciles the two schools of thought. Now that you’ve understood it, what are your objections?