Consciousness: brain lesions remove free will (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 15, 2018, 14:47 (2168 days ago) @ dhw

David’s comment: long ago we agreed that the brain is the site of consciousness which uses specific areas of the brain to appear properly in thought.

dhw: Your comment threatens to reopen the whole debate concerning materialism v dualism, which can only lead to our going over the same ground again and again. Just to clarify: the question is whether consciousness is a product of the brain (which seems to be the implication in this article) or is an immaterial “soul” which works with the brain. The only agreement we had was that if there is such a thing as a “soul”, it is sited in the brain.

DAVID: You keep forgetting most of the articles available for presentation are Darwinian in underlying premise.

dhw: This has nothing to do with Darwin. You seem to think that the very mention of the name invalidates any conclusions other than your own. But my comment was a simple clarification, as your own could have been taken to mean that consciousness was not actually produced by the brain, and that was not agreed between us. (I remain typically neutral on the subject of materialism v. dualism!)

DAVID: And we agree that certain attributes of consciousness are associated with different areas of the brain.

dhw: Yes indeed. Again, the question is whether those sections of the brain are the source of the attributes of consciousness, or the tools which a “soul” uses in order to implement particular aspects of itself, or a combination of both (see THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE).

And as Egnor, the pediatric neurosurgeon notes, removing large sections of the brain usually does not change the attributes of consciousness, so how necessary are normal brain regions?