Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Thursday, August 23, 2018, 12:44 (2282 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] 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: I've explained it over and over.

You have repeated it over and over, but have never explained it, no doubt because one cannot explain something that makes no sense. My apologies if this sounds offensive, but I really do wish you would drop the whole theory! At least your original theory, that our consciousness (soul) was part of God’s consciousness, was intelligible.

DAVID: Let's start by not accepting 'soul'. In life all of us think with our brains. You don't deny that.

In this context, “we think with our brains” is an obfuscation. There are two possibilities. If the soul doesn’t exist, our brains do the thinking. If the soul does exist, the soul does the thinking and uses the brain for information and material expression.

DAVID: 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.

Yet again you separate the soul from “I” – the “crime” you keep accusing me of! The soul IS the immaterial essence of you. It doesn’t do what you do. It does what it does! And yes it thinks and uses your brain as above.

DAVID: 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.

It is your belief that the soul thinks separately from the brain when there is no brain! So if the soul can think separately from the brain when there is no brain, there “can be no other conclusion” than that in life it thinks and uses the brain to gather information and to “broadcast” or give material expression to its thoughts (speech is not the only form of expression).

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.

DAVID: 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. […]

Once again, it is you who are separating the soul from the self! The soul IS the unconscious patient – it is his immaterial identity, the conscious part of his self. And it still knows about its experiences when it returns to the brain, and then it uses the brain to communicate its experience to others. It makes no sense to say that the soul informs itself of what it experienced!

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?

DAVID: 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?

NOTHING explains immaterial consciousness! It is a mystery. At those moments when you forget about your illogical translation theory, you claim that our consciousness is a part of your God’s consciousness. That doesn’t explain consciousness either – it merely shifts the mystery to God instead of ourselves. And how, in your illogical translation theory, can the soul think incomprehensible thoughts and have them “translated” into electrical waves, which it then translates back into understandable thought?

DAVID: 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.

I don’t know what you mean by “addition” – I thought you believed the soul WAS part of God’s consciousness, but couldn’t think until it had done the weird translation trick. My theory (theistic version) has your God inventing a machine (the brain) which can produce thought and possibly even an immaterial essence that can survive the demise of the machine. Humans are also trying to produce machines that can think, but (theistic version), your God got there before them. Your only objection now seems to be that this doesn’t fit in with your theory (whichever one it happens to be). I’ve told you my logical objections to yours. What are your logical objections to mine?