Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 28, 2018, 14:22 (2277 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: In material life I use my brain to think. My thoughts are those electric waves we see on EEG. How they are created in electric waves and then appear in our minds as words is the mystery of consciousness.

dhw: The electric waves come from the brain. If they are thoughts, then the brain is the source of thought, and that is materialism. If the dualist’s soul is the source of thought, then the waves are the result of thought.[…]

DAVID: IF-one: The brain is not the source of thought, it is the maker of thought with its electric grid under my/soul impetus. Looking on the material side I/soul use the brain to create thought.

So once again we have the soul thinking thought but it doesn’t know what it is thinking about until the brain “makes the thought” into electric waves and sends them back to the soul to translate into words. Please tell me what you believe your soul thinks in initially.

DAVID: IF-two: Absolutely wrong. I/soul must employ the brain circuits to create thought.

Same problem. What does your soul, which must be the source of thought if the brain is not, think in initially?

DAVID: What doesn't make sense to you is the hard problem of consciousness. Those electric waves are thought in a material form.

dhw: What doesn’t make sense to me is your whole translation theory. Nobody has solved the “hard problem of consciousness”, which is why we have different theories. The material form of thought is expression, which comes about through the use of electricity. If the soul thinks, it directs the brain to give material expression to the thought. It makes no sense for the soul to think, have its thoughts translated into electric waves and then sent back again for it to translate into its original thought, which it then sends back again to the brain to translate into material expression (e.g. speech).

DAVID: I'm sorry you are so confused, but this is what the research scientists think on the material side of the issue. Thought is encoded in the electricity and comes out as words in my head, the hard problem we face.

Perhaps you can tell us which research scientists inform us that there is a soul which initiates thought but cannot understand its own thought until it translates the electric waves which the brain sends to it. Since you believe in a soul, which is a part of God’s consciousness and which can think on its own when separated from the brain, your “hard problem” is why in life the dualist's soul can’t think coherent thoughts in the first place, just as you believe it does in an afterlife. This “hard problem” becomes dead easy if the soul thinks coherent thoughts, in life as in death, but in life uses the brain to acquire information and to give its thoughts material expression, both processes requiring electric waves.

DAVID: [...] any immaterial entity arising/created from the material is materialism.

dhw: That is not a rebuttal of the theory! Please explain why you think it impossible for your God to have created a material mechanism that produces an immaterial soul.

DAVID: I don't think souls arise from material forms. God breathed a soul into Adam making him a living being, to quote the Bible.

dhw: I know what you believe. That doesn’t explain why you think it is impossible for your God to have created a material mechanism that produces an immaterial soul.

DAVID: Anything is possible for God according to human religious reasoning, but the Bible is specific on the point.

All of a sudden you, who have always rejected the Bible as a source of reliable information, are a convert to Genesis.

DAVID: Since from quantum theory I accept the concept of universal consciousness as God or coming from God, I think the immaterial has to be injected into the material.

I know you do. That is not a logical reason for rejecting the proposal that your God might have created a material machine which can produce immaterial consciousness. It’s simply a reaffirmation of your rigid belief.