Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 04, 2018, 09:42 (2270 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: All of a sudden you are discounting NDEs […] Your theory ignores the evidence you keep quoting, and presents us with the absurdity of an English-speaking soul which cannot understand its own thoughts until it translates them into English.

DAVID: NDE's not ignored. The soul when it leaves the body changes so it can operate without any dependence on the living brain which while living, you have admitted a dependence exists. Where we disagree is on the degree of dependence. You accept information and expression, but not thought. I accept thought in addition. […]

And your ambivalent versions concerning the source of thought are what lead to the absurdity of the above theory, which I keep repeating and which you keep glossing over.

DAVID: You simply don't accept my view in how the soul might solve the problem of consciousness.

dhw: Of course the soul (if it exists) solves the problem of consciousness! According to you it is a piece of your God's consciousness, and consciousness has to be conscious! It doesn't have to translate its own thoughts into its own language before it knows what it is thinking about.

DAVID: I'm sure, ignoring solipsism, you think with your brain's functions and drag along your 'possible' soul in the process.

Now who are “you”? I thought “you” were your soul, so what exactly is “dragging” what? A few days ago, it was your soul that instructed the brain, but if your soul is being “dragged” along, presumably it’s now the brain that is in command. Hey ho, this is the topsy-turvy world of the translation theory.

DAVID: All the while, the thoughts are created in electric waves which require translation to be heard as words in our heads.

Created by what? Electric waves come from the brain, but if the brain creates and has a memory bank of words, as you told us last time, why does it need the soul to translate its waves into words it already knows? Why can’t the brain think directly in the words already at its disposal? Same question I asked about the soul. Topsy-turvy again.

DAVID: At birth I could not think. I had to develop my physical brain and learn to think. What was the infant soul capable of in thought process at that point in life? In your version of soul please tell me.

I have told you before (but please keep in mind that I remain neutral in the battle between materialism and dualism, and have actually proposed a hypothesis that would reconcile the two). At birth the conscious soul (but not the personality) is blank. It is your God-given ability to think, but it cannot function until it has something to be conscious OF! The brain supplies the information for the soul, mainly through the senses, and as the brain matures, the amount of information it passes on (including language) increases, and so the conscious soul increases the range of its thought, and continues to do so throughout life.