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

by dhw, Sunday, December 20, 2020, 09:39 (1434 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A mentally ill patient cannot control his sick thoughts even as his self/soul wishes to. I will stick to claiming that I/soul run my brain.

I wish you would!

dhw: In the comment I replied to, you have the soul thinking reasonable thoughts, but the sick brain somehow changes them and the reasonable soul can’t do anything about it. How can you then argue that the soul runs the brain, if its reasonable thoughts are converted into sick thoughts? bbYou have never responded to the point that if the soul does all the thinking, and analyses the information given to it by the brain, it should be able to detect false information whether the brain is sick or not.bb

DAVID: What you cannot seem to absorb is the living relationship we are discussing. The soul must think with the type of brain it is given. A soul trying to produce rational thought with a sick brain will not produce rational thought. The brain will distort it, and the soul will have to accept the output.

And materialists will say that a sick brain will not produce rational thought. No need for a “soul”. The “living relationship” we are discussing is that of the dualist’s immaterial thinking soul which uses the material non-thinking brain to gather information which it (the brain) then processes, analyses etc. before reaching a decision to which the non-thinking brain then gives material expression. You have agreed to this. Your answer to my bold appears to be that the soul actually knows the information is false, but because the brain is sick….what happens? It refuses to give material expression to the soul’s thought, and insists on committing murder?

DAVID: In patients with mild mental illness, I have seen some who recognize their thinking is not correct. In more severely ill patients they do not.

What sort of illness are you talking about? It is perfectly logical to assume that if the brain is the source of thought, a mild illness of the brain will not produce as many ill effects as a major illness. But the materialist question would be why an illness of the material brain should stop an immaterial “soul” from thinking normally. Your earlier comment now seems to imply that it DOES think normally, but it has lost control of the brain which has its own sick thoughts. But the dualist’s brain does not think! Only the soul thinks! That is why such diseases support the case for materialism.

DAVID: It [the soul] is the source of thought output. The soul is trapped into accepting the results. I think of this as my living self is a representation of my living soul. Obviously I have to produce thought with the brain I have. My brain does not produce thought until I make it think. I drive my brain to produce thought that I wish to produce.

But in sickness apparently your brain thinks thoughts which your soul does NOT want it to think. So there you go again: there is a battle between the thinking soul and the thinking brain, and the brain wins. You might just as well not have a soul. Once more: that is why materialists regard psychopaths, druggies, alcoholics etc. as providing solid evidence that the brain is the source of thought.

dhw: And how can the soul be said to drive the brain when you keep insisting that it is the sick brain that drives the soul – which apparently tries but fails to reject the thoughts passed on by the brain?

DAVID: The sick brain never drives the soul!! The soul must accept the sick output a sick brain produces when the soul tries to think using the brain.

What “output”? The dualist’s brain does not produce thought. That is the function of the soul.

dhw: It will save a lot of unnecessary debate. It would also be useful if you would agree specifically to my proposal that the soul uses the brain to gather information and to give material expression to its thoughts.

DAVID: The bold is agreed to in its limited form.

Why “in its limited form”? Either it is or it isn’t the dualist’s view of the relationship. The brain does not do the thinking. And therefore the soul should be capable of distinguishing between true and false information, whether the brain is sick or not.

Brain mental capacity
dhw: …you have labelled this thread “Brain mental capacity”, and the child’s ability to work out the solutions to complex immaterial maths problems surely belongs to the kind of abstract reasoning you and Egnor are so keen to attribute to the soul. If the ability to solve such problems depends on the brain, what function does the soul perform in the activity?

DAVID: It drives the brain to produce the prodigious activity is is capable of performing. We only can work with the type of brain we are given. Very simple or enormously capable.

Is it the dualist’s brain or the soul that solves the equations? If you wish to argue that our capabilities are decided by the type of brain we have (and I’m not opposing the argument), you will be warmly welcomed by materialists and determinists.