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

by dhw, Friday, December 18, 2020, 10:52 (1225 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

dhw: You are asking me to defend dualism against the materialist argument – which you have yourself inadvertently summarized quite perfectly: “sick brain can only produce sick thoughts”. The dualist’s brain does not produce thoughts. The dualist’s soul produces the thoughts.

DAVID: "Sick brain. sick thoughts" does not mean the brain can think on its own. That is your strange interpretation of what I present It means when the soul uses the brain's networks to create thought; if the brain is sick, the intended thoughts are distorted AND NOT WHAT THE SOUL INTENDED is what appears as thought. The bold does not imply all of those relationships. Only the soul makes proper thoughts by using the normal brain. This is my concept of dualism. Any person with a self concept knows this.

I shan’t go through the list of quotes in which you have the brain producing thoughts, as bolded. So long as you stick to your agreement that the dualist’s brain does not think, we can drop that subject. What you have specified here raises a different problem. You now describe the dualist’s soul as actually having normal intentions which are overridden by the sick brain. As if the psychopath, the epileptic, the drug addict, the drunkard actually intended to be kind to the person they have murdered. This is the weirdest of all your versions. Do you really think the soul says to itself: “I don’t want to harm my dear wife” – and the sick brain says “Kill her” so the soul gives in? We agree that diseases, drugs, alcohol affect the brain and cause the person to act abnormally. This is a huge problem for the dualist, because it implies that the brain is the source of the thoughts that lead to abnormal behaviour, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that when/if the brain is freed from these influences, normal thought returns. If the sick brain offers false information to the dualist’s immaterial soul, that should not prevent the soul from continuing to perform its function of processing, analysing and even rejecting false information, as it does when the brain is not sick. Our brains present us with false information all the time. Otherwise, we would believe every word our politicians and our media tell us!