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

by dhw, Friday, January 01, 2021, 11:15 (1422 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Nobody understands consciousness, but one theory is that its source is the brain. i.e. that it is a product of the biochemical interactions of the brain cells. That is materialism – precisely as you have described it. No “garbage” involved.

DAVID: A conscious brain is worthless unless there is living self/soul to drive it. Pure dualism. The material brain is only a tool. There has to be a material part and an immaterial part. Pure material, as in a brain does nothing unless alive, and that is an emergent event..

dhw: Not even a materialist would deny that the brain has to be alive in order to think! That doesn’t mean there must be a separate entity called the soul which “emerges” from...what? You simply solve the mystery by creating another mystery!

DAVID: Exactly. The matter that forms any organism is not alive unless life emerges. That is one of the mysteries. The other is the consciousness which emerges, and then thought appears. The materialist leaves out the two emergent properties, both of which imply immaterial levels ah td have to magically appear.

The materialist doesn’t leave them out! He uses the terms used by the materialist David: “consciousness is an emergent product of the living brain.” That means the brain produces consciousness, but nobody knows how. Whereas the dualist David believes that the conscious self is a separate entity (somehow emanating from a mysterious being called God, though nobody knows how), is not a product of the brain, and lives on after death, but the two entities work together during life.

DAVID: We know what is living, and we know that carefully designed functions and interconnections with biochemicals somehow creates living organisms. Thus the original basis is material. It has to be.

dhw: Once again, we are in complete agreement. No one can explain life and consciousness. Materialists believe – just as you do – that these both emerge from biochemicals.

DAVID: Not by themselves. There is an additional spark that makes it all begin, and that is God's gift.

You have lost sight of the subject. Is consciousness the product of biochemical interactions between the cells of the brain, as you have maintained (= materialism), or is it part of a separate entity called the soul, as you have maintained (= dualism)?

dhw: You have embraced 1), materialism, with your crystal clear statement that consciousness is a product of the brain cells, but your belief in a mysterious, immaterial something as a separate entity which lives on after the death of the brain (NDEs) means you also embrace 2), dualism. You are on my fence, whether you like it or not!

DAVID: It's just I don't believe it like you do. Piles of chemical even put together in a dead corpse are not life. We can't explain why we live any more than we can explain how we think with a consciousness.

Agreed. See above for a summary of the two equally problematic “explanations” which you have embraced.

I’m going to skip the rest of this post, because back in April 2018, on a thread called A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE, I suggested a compromise between the two theories. It covered most of the ground we’ve been discussing here, so I’ll reproduce what I wrote in Part Two, 26 April 2018:

"There is, then, no dichotomy. Our personal cell communities cooperate with one another to produce all the attributes that make us ourselves, and the brain’s thinkers direct the brain’s implementers, just as they do in any community. But outside forces (diseases, drugs) can disrupt the inner communities and change their behaviour, again as in any community. In extreme cases, the cells cannot defend themselves.

Does this mean that we are at the mercy of our cells? No. We mustn’t think of them as aliens residing inside us. They ARE us. And we ARE the “colony”. Their intelligence is our intelligence, we are the thinking community, and all the interacting internal and external factors that shape us from birth – both material (e.g. genes) and immaterial (e.g. experiences) – are unique to each of us. (It is also worth noting that nothing is fixed, because there is a constant interaction between what happens outside us and what happens inside us.) And so, according to this hypothesis, the materialists are right, because the source of our intelligence is the material cell. And the dualists are right, because what is created by the material cells is the individual, immaterial intelligence/consciousness with all that it entails: will, emotion, memory, inventiveness etc. Ours is on a vastly higher level than that of individual bacteria and individual ants, but the two examples show the potential for complexity that arises from cooperation between individual intelligences, let alone between multiple communities of intelligences."

The compromise leaves open the source of the intelligent cell and the question of an afterlife (NDEs), but it removes the dichotomy between materialism and dualism in the same way as we removed the argument against free will: the cells are unique to us, and what we call the soul (the sum of all the immaterial attributes that give us our individual identities) emerges from the combined intelligences and experiences undergone by the different cell communities that make up our material selves. Theistic version: instead of giving us a soul, your God gave us the means to create our own soul.