Free Will: Egnor shows neurological proof (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 16, 2020, 10:17 (1438 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

DAVID: We know the brain stores all sorts of information and helps is our sensations to fill in holes in what we realize. That is why cloud formations will look like familiar objects like Mickey Mouse, England, a woman's head. […] Pattern help is what confused Romansh.

dhw: Romansh was not confused. His argument was that there was no escaping the chain of cause and effect, going right back to the fact that if the universe didn't exist, we would not be here. Pattern forming underlies the perception department of gestalt psychology and is integral to the way we interpret the world and generally form meanings. Basically, we join up the dots to create a coherent pattern. It sheds no light whatsoever on the problem of the source of consciousness or the clash between dualism versus materialism. Whether you say the brain or the soul joins the dots is a matter of personal belief.

DAVID: Not for me. Both Romansh and you are confused. I run my brain, I force it to get educated as a doctor. I am my soul. Only 40% of my brain is under genetic control. I am 60% free to accept or reject my parent's influence and I can develop myself as I wish. No one told me to enter medicine, except me. Personally my father figure was from a weak but very sweet Father. My Mother was exceedingly strong and I had break away from her, and did. My American-Jewish background helps form principals I live by, but I recognize them and changes them as I learn. I started out as very liberal and now I am a libertarian, directly opposite.

I have no idea what brought this on. You had misread Romansh’s argument against free will, and you had entered into gestalt psychology, which describes how we form meanings and has nothing to do with the existence of a soul or of free will. Your fascinating biography illustrates option 2, which we discussed earlier: namely, the defence of free will as being decisions made entirely by the self (regardless of what influences made us what we are) and by no one else, within limitations imposed by our own abilities and by the situation we are in.

DAVID: The other aspect of it comes from NDE's. It tells us a non-functioning brain allows the soul to separate from it and somehow think on its own, and this implies that the same circumstance happens after true death.

dhw: Your “somehow” is the crux of the whole matter. But NDEs clearly denote that the soul is the immaterial thinking part of the self (evidence for dualism). However, if the soul is capable of thinking without the brain, it makes no sense for it to lose its ability to think while it is residing in the brain, even if the brain is sick. (Problem discussed in Part One.) The concept of an afterlife also raises the intriguing question of what sort of soul the psychopath will have when he/she has got rid of the brain – but that’s another subject!

DAVID: The NDE evidence forms my theory that the soul in life must think using the material brain. but it has dual roles and in death is capable of conscious thought without a brain.

NDE evidence only suggests that the soul does the thinking in life, but it uses the brain to gather information and to give material expression to its thoughts. Otherwise, we would be unable to live in the material world. NDEs contradict the theory that the immaterial thinking soul is unable to think when the brain is sick or not functioning.