Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 23, 2018, 19:56 (2282 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

That our consciousness is part of God's has never changed.

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

dhw: 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.

Not so. I use my brain to think. I control my brain . It does nothing until I tell it to act. That is the material side of the issue. I view your thought at totally confused.

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.

dhw: 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.

My soul is me! You've separated us again!

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?

dhw: 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?

The soul and I, one and the same, use the brain to create thoughts. My soul is separate from me only in death or NDE's,

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?

Having the grain invent consciousness is materialism. My soul is me and the soul and I use the brain to create thought. When Libet asked his subjects to think and timed EEG results why did he measure EEG timing ?