Free Will: Egnor shows neurological proof - PART ONE (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 18, 2020, 10:48 (1436 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The brain cannot think without the soul driving it. […]

dhw: Back you go to your thinking brain! The dualist’s brain doesn’t think! The soul does the thinking!

DAVID: Stated another way: only the soul can create and drive thought in the brain. The soul must use the brain networks to think. The brain can never create thought on its own. It provides sensory information and memorized information.

Your "other way" is yet another jumble of obfuscations. I don’t understand the first sentence. What do you mean by “creating and driving thought in the brain”? Your second sentence (with your "on its own")implies that the brain creates thought when it works with the soul, whereas in dualism, it is the soul that creates thought, using the brain. Your last sentence correctly describes how the dualist’s soul uses the brain, but you have omitted the fact that the dualist’s soul also uses the brain to give material expression to its thoughts.

DAVID: The analysis is performed by the soul using the brain networks.

dhw: But that is not what you wrote! I’ve bolded it: “the soul will only receive…incorrect analytic thought.” And over and over again you talk of the brain thinking.
DAVID: Only driven by the soul.

dhw: Which means the soul drives the brain to do the analysing, which the soul then “receives”. But the dualist’s soul is supposed to do the analysing!

DAVID: No,no,no!!! The soul uses the brain's networks to do the analysis. The soul is the analyzer, the brain its tool.

I am the one who cried no, no, no. The dualist’s soul does not “receive incorrect analytic thought”. I’m glad you now see that your bolded statement above is totally wrong.

DAVID: The soul forms thoughts using the brain, a great difference.

dhw: It’s an enormous difference. So please stop telling us that the dualist's soul tells the brain to think! The dualist’s brain does not do the thinking!

DAVID: The soul uses the brain as its machine to create thought. The brain cannot think on its own.

The dualist’s brain cannot think. It is the materialist’s brain that thinks “on its own”. (See above.) And the dualist’s brain is not a machine that creates thought. It is a machine that provides information for the dualist’s soul to think about, and provides material expression for the soul’s immaterial thoughts. Why do keep trying to twist this simple description into tortuous ambiguities?

dhw: What I said is we know the brain changes thought, and thought changes the brain, so we can’t know from this whether the source of thought/ consciousness is soul or brain.

DAVID: My brain thinks only what I/soul want to think. Only a sick brain can change desired thought the soul wishes to make.

dhw: The dualist's brain doesn’t think. Full stop. Your comment totally misses the point I am making here, which is that the two-way process makes it impossible to judge whether the source of consciousness is a soul or the brain.

DAVID: A sick brain will makes the reasonable thoughts by the soul sick thoughts. The soul has no control about the end product!!! Consciousness is beside the point. we don't know what makes it arise. Let's just stick to what runs the brain.

We don’t know what runs the brain! That is why we have the clash between dualism and materialism! The dualist’s soul is supposed to run the brain – not the other way round. But if you claim that the immaterial, controlling soul is governed by the sick brain, there is really no point in having a soul at all. That is why materialists point to examples of sick thoughts (whether permanent [psychopaths] or temporary [epileptics]) as evidence that it is the brain that does the thinking – hence the fact that such wrong-doers are deemed not to have free will and therefore not to be responsible for their crimes.

dhw: Whenever you have the brain thinking, you are supporting materialism. (I'd better repeat that I remain neutral on the subject).

DAVID: One last time, the soul creates thought using the brain networks, but in life the soul cannot think without a functional brain.

First part spot on, at last! But the second part excludes one of the few pieces of evidence we have for the very existence of a soul – namely, NDEs, during which the brain is not functional but the patient is still alive. Without such cases (plus other psychic experiences), the argument for dualism would remain pretty thin. But I hope our discussion will now put an end to all the obfuscations with which you keep implying or explicitly stating that the dualist’s brain thinks.

Under “Brain mental capacity”

QUOTE: “'To ‘warm up’, she requested a large number of cube root problems, that is, extracting the cube roots of large numbers, mostly in the millions, hundreds of millions, and trillions. The average time Devi took for extracting all of these cube roots was just six seconds, with a range of two to 10 seconds.'”

DAVID: A form of highly functional autism. IQ can be raised by proper education to a degree, but this state is from birth and a gift.

Amazing and wonderful. These calculations would normally require hours of conscious thought and analysis, and I’m sure materialists would agree with you that such astonishing mental feats are to be directly attributed to the brain.