Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example II (General)

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

dhw: All of these quotes except the first give full support to materialism, i.e. that the brain is the source of thought and consciousness. There is no mention of a soul. In the other section that you quoted, however, he casts doubt on whether the brain tells the whole story of consciousness, and asks us to keep an open mind. This brings us back to the alternative I gave you in the first post: if the electric brain waves are thoughts, then the brain is the source of thought, and that is materialism. If the soul is the source of thought (= dualism), then the electric brain waves are the result of thought. That is the dichotomy I have tried to resolve with my theory, and I still await your logical objections.

David: Your rigid fixation on your concept of dualism is amazing. Of course this is all pure materialism, as it is the current concept of brain and thought with neuroscientists as they research. I accept this as true. The problem is the how we 'hear' the words in our heads, which you keep ignoring by having the soul think separately and dictating to the brain like a dictation machine.

According to your belief in an afterlife, the soul DOES think separately, so why do you think it can’t think separately in life as it processes information provided by the brain (but provided by psychic means in an afterlife) and instructs the brain to give its thoughts material expression (but expressing its thoughts psychically in an afterlife)?

DAVID: I believe the universe is mind centric under God:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/what-does-it-mean-to-say-mind-is-primary/

QUOTE:
1. Mind is the universal substrate of existence and experience, not matter.
2. There are universal and local principles by which mind operates and by which experience is generated.
3. There are many different kinds of experience one can have in mind, such as: consensual physicality (what we call the conscious, waking world); non-consensual physicality (such as dreams); non-physical & non-consensual thought & imagery (such as imagination, visualization); and consensual thought (such as self-evident truths, morality, logic and math). There are other kind of experience that are less accepted, but which have been researched successfully, such as consensual visualization, semi-consensual experience, and others.
It is my view that this is a much more elegant theory of experience than those which include an actual material-world component, because an actual material world is (1) philosophically unnecessary, (2) unsupported by the evidence, and (3) impossible to verify or validate outside of mental experience anyway."

I doubt if anyone will disagree that “there are many different kinds of experience one can have in mind”. As for the rest, I suggest as I have done many times before that the author should step in front of a bus and, if he survives, tell us if he still thinks that an actual material world is unsupported by the evidence. We both agree that in life we have a material brain, and our discussion concerns whether there is such a thing as an immaterial mind or soul, and if there is, what role it plays in life. The above goes to extremes in its rejection of a material world, so I don’t see how the author could possibly support your claim that in life the soul/mind can’t think without translating its thought into electrical waves from the material brain, which it then translates back into its original thought so that it can understand what it was thinking about in the first place. As far as he is concerned, even the brain is "unsupported by the evidence"!

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