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

by dhw, Tuesday, December 22, 2020, 11:14 (1432 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To repeat, I/self/soul can only think with the brain I am given to use.

dhw: Once again you muddy the waters by refusing to acknowledge what the soul uses the brain for. The soul thinks with brain circuits, whether the brain is sick or not. […]. If it recognizes false information when the brain is not sick, it should still do so when the brain is sick.

DAVID: A repeat of your total muddle. Correct in bold. By after that, In my view, taken from life's experience, the soul must use the brains' networks to form an thought. Sick networks can only create sick thinking. A psychopath's soul doesn't know it is psychopathic.

I am not disputing that the soul must use the brain’s networks to form a thought! But the brain supplies the information, and the soul thinks about it! The networks do not create thought, whether sick or "normal".Your refusal to acknowledge these different functions is what causes your “total muddle”! The fact that a psychopath has a diseased brain and doesn’t know he is a psychopath is evidence that the brain is the source of thought. The soul has no role to play!

DAVID: My theory is pure dualism. Repeat: my soul can only think by using brain networks to actually form any thought.

Yes.

DAVID: If the networks are sick the thoughts will be distorted and the soul cannot recognize it because it uses those same circuits for all of its observations.

If the soul is capable of distinguishing true from false, then it should make no difference whether the false comes from a sick or a healthy brain, because the dualist’s brain does not analyse the information! The key to your own “total misunderstanding” is your earlier statement that the soul “RECEIVES incorrect analytic thought”. The brain does not analyse. That is the function of the soul. If the soul RECEIVES a false analysis, then of course the thoughts will be false! The soul is then irrelevant. The sick brain has done the whole job: provide information, analyse it, and take the decision.

DAVID: You separate the soul by saying it can stand aside and observe that the brain is sick. […]

Belief that the soul is responsible for thought does not “separate” it from the brain! But just like different parts of the brain, it has its own function – namely, to do the thinking, while the brain does the information-gathering and the material implementation. In both theories (dualism and materialism), the source has to be part of the whole! The rest of your two posts repeats the same points, so I will try to condense.

dhw: Taking this example: the brain provides the soul with the mathematical problem (= the information) presented to it. The soul analyses the information and then instructs the brain to use the voice in order to tell everyone the answer it has worked out. Remember your own words: “The soul is the analyzer, the brain its tool.” Yes or no?

DAVID: Not yes or no. See above. The soul forms analytic thought using the brain networks to create that analysis. The child's amazing networks allowed that degree of solution.

More fudge. Once again you gloss over what the soul uses the brain for (information and material expression). The analysis of the information is done by the soul, not by the networks. But if the child was born with these “amazing networks”, it suggests that the amazing thought process of analysing the information and reaching a conclusion springs from the networks.

dhw: […] yet again: the dualist’s immaterial soul resides within the material brain, is the thinking part of the self, uses the brain to collect information, analyses it, and then “dictates” its thoughts to the brain so that the brain can mobilize its material means of giving material expression to those thoughts. None of this contradicts anything in your statement above.

DAVID: The bold is totally opposite to my theory. The soul cannot dictate to the brain. The soul can only form thought by entering the brain's circuits and using them to FORM its thoughts. The brain then broadcasts them as words in the mind, as typed, spoken, or handwritten. This is our vast difference and how Egnor sees it.

There is no difference whatsoever, except that again you leave out the functions: here, you have the brain “broadcasting”, but you omit the soul’s instruction to the brain to “broadcast”, i.e. type, speak or write the soul’s decision. That is the “dictation”.

DAVID: The criminal insanity defense accepts my position in court.

No it doesn’t. The criminal insanity defense argues that the accused has a mental disease – temporary (e.g. the influence of drugs or alcohol) or permanent (our psychopath). The court does not say the brain provided the soul with false results, and does not discuss whether the source of thought is a soul or the brain. However, the very fact that brain abnormalities have been found in psychopaths, and that drugs and alcohol interfere with the brain’s networks and hence the nature of the person’s thoughts, offers strong support to the materialist view that the brain is the source of thought.