Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, August 22, 2018, 18:50 (2283 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

I've explained it over and over. Let's start by not accepting 'soul'. In life all of us think with our brains. You don't deny that. Next, accept our souls are our essence. They do exactly what we do but as immaterial forms. If I think with my brain my soul does also. There can be no other conclusion unless, as you always proclaim, the soul thinks separatly from the brain and just broadcasts its thoughts through the brain just like a radio broadcaster speaking into a mic.

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.

dhw: 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.

A total misrepresentation of my theory. Of course the soul knows what is going on in the NDE, but the unconscious patient does not know until the soul returns to usable brain networks to inform the now conscious patient. You need to read Eben Alexander's book, a far greater expert than I.

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.

dhw: 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?

I've got it all along. It doesn't explain immaterial consciousness at all, but a material source for the immaterial. How are the EEG waves translated into understandable thought? My addition of God's consciousness is not what you have really proposed in the past or even now. You still have the brain with a brain-based mechanism for consciousness which is not really a part of a universal God's consciousness.