Free Will: Egnor shows neurological proof (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 02, 2020, 21:01 (1452 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The point is the brain never produces abstract thought during seizures. Only the soul can do that as it uses the brain. You can't avoid that thought.

dhw: The point is that the SOUL never produces abstract thought during seizures, but if only the soul does the thinking (as you have agreed), it should be able to think about the information being sent to it by the sick brain. IT DOESN’T.

DAVID: No. My view is the soul cannot recognize what is truly going on because it is trapped into using a sick brain. A seizure can produce false sensory information as my sea shore patient's smell of the [sea] was a seizure reproducing a memory. The soul did recognize that brain production.

dhw: First you support Egnor’s contention that during seizures there is no abstract reasoning, and now you tell me that there is abstract reasoning (apparently the patient knew his brain had provided him with false information).

I never said a seizure creates abstract thoughts. Neither does Egnor.

dhw: Conclusion: the mechanism for abstract thought (Egnor equates it with reasoning) has been put out of action by the brain seizure, and therefore the mechanism for abstract thought must be part of the brain. Hence "sick brain = sick thoughts".

DAVID: Totally backwards. Egnor says if the brain is an exact/primary source of all abstractions, the abnormal electrical impulse, which drives into the abstraction area, and should produce an abstraction during a seizure, but never does.

dhw: If the abnormal impulses drive into the brain’s abstraction area, that would explain why the abstraction area does not function any more! Only when the impulses are “normal” will the abstraction area function properly again. The electrical impulses should only affect the brain, not the immaterial “soul” which processes and analyses and reasons about the information provided by the brain. Sick brain = sick thoughts. Therefore the brain produces the thoughts. (In contrast to near-death experiences, which do appear to offer “proof” that there IS a soul which thinks abstract thoughts when the brain isn’t functioning.)

You are so contortedly confused. The abstraction area is absolutely normal before and after the seizure. When the seizure electrical impulse enters the abstraction area it doesn't cause the brain to produce abstractions as it should if the brain was the only and total source of abstractions by itself. In other words the material brain does not have abstract thoughts set up for appearance if electricity stimulates that area. Egnor has produced another essay:

https://mindmatters.ai/2020/12/has-neuroscience-proved-that-the-mind-is-just-the-brain/

"The “hard problem” is another matter entirely: How do material brain states correspond to mental states? How could a certain concentration of chemicals in my brain cause me to do calculus? How could a specific electrochemical gradient in my brain make me feel sad? What is the link?

"The answer, says Chalmers, is that we have no idea how brain states can cause thoughts. There is certainly no explanation provided by science—there is no mathematical formula that links neurons to thoughts and there is no reason to think there ever will be or ever can be. Brains are material, thoughts are immaterial, and there is no way imaginable to explain one by the other. This is why the hard problem (Chalmers himself coined the term in 1995) is hard—it’s not even tractable by neuroscience, let alone solvable.

"Other philosophers have used different terms for the hard problem—Joseph Levine calls it the Explanatory Gap. But the problem is the same. There is no explanation for the mental on the basis of the physical. No physics or chemistry explains thought.

"What is not in doubt is that, to some extent, thoughts correlate with brain activity. On that, dualists and materialists agree. But what is also not in doubt is that there is no materialist explanation—and there cannot be a materialist explanation— for the mind.

***

"The pioneering research of Wilder Penfield in neurosurgery for epilepsy strongly supported dualism. The research on the correlates between brain activity and will by Benjamin Libet supports a dualist interpretation of free will (Libet himself was a property dualist).

"Roger Sperry’s Nobel-prize winning research on split-brain patients clearly supports a non-materialist perspective. Sperry, whose philosophy I would describe as idealist, rejected the prevailing materialism common among neuroscientists:

"'[I rejected] the then prevalent ’mechanistic, materialistic, behavioristic, fatalistic, reductionistic view’ of the ‘nature of mind and psyche’. It was on this occasion that I openly changed my alignment from behaviorist materialism to antimechanistic and nonreductive mentalism…"

"The emerging science of near-death experiences, as well as the evidence for mental activity even in the most profound states of coma, provide powerful evidence for the ability of the mind to function at least somewhat independently of the body. It can be argued that even the strong similarity between the ape brain and the human brain is evidence for dualism because the profound dissimilarity between the human mind and the ape mind cannot be readily explained on a material basis."

I don't have room for more. Study the entry itself for more discussion.