Simon Conway Morris on animal intelligence (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 23, 2017, 16:24 (2653 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The brain develops as the baby begins to have experiences. I view the arrangement between two entities, a material brain and an immaterial consciousness mechanism, which learn to work together.
dhw: Yes of course they work together. And according to your dualism, it is consciousness that controls the brain, so there is absolutely no logic to your argument that the brain gives rise to consciousness or enhanced consciousness. That is materialism. I flounder because I do not know which theory is true. You flounder because your “strange form of dualism” is totally illogical.
DAVID: As a baby I am a blank slate.

Not quite. Even newborn babies arrive with different characteristics, as the newborn twins demonstrate every day (and night) to their doting parents!

DAVID: My brain has to develop for 20 years or so to have a complete material form.

Of course the baby’s brain develops along with the rest of the body, and the personality/conscious mind develops too as it processes experience – but nobody knows if the development and the manner of processing are dictated by the materialist’s all-embracing brain or by the dualist’s separate conscious mind.

DAVID: My dualism does not have consciousness controlling the brain. As I develop I assume control of the consciousness mechanism through experience in thought and the brain's plasticity to respond to how I use it. I look at the process as having three parts: the brain, consciousness, and me. You keep skipping the part where I become 'me' and I use my consciousness to develop my thoughts and concepts.

I don’t skip it. I keep asking what you mean by “me”, bearing in mind that you think “you” survive the death of your brain. In your previous post you responded by calling it your “mental totality”, and that is what I call the “conscious mind”. But your term is probably better because my “conscious mind” has to incorporate all its influences, which of course would include those that are unconscious. However, now you are saying there is no duality in dualism. It is a trinity: brain, consciousness, me. Except that when we die...

DAVID: My personally shaped consciousness, me, is the entity that survives me the body envelop.

If “me” is your personally shaped consciousness, or "mental totality", that is what controls the brain and survives the death of the brain. And yet you say “consciousness does not control the brain” but is “a mechanism the brain uses”, and – the starting point of our discussion – enhanced consciousness, which I regard as the springboard for all the differences between our fellow animals and ourselves, is to be attributed to your God providing our mental totality (us) with an enlarged brain. And so our mental totality (= we) controls the brain, but the brain uses and has given rise to our enhanced consciousness. This would only make sense if you separated your (enhanced) consciousness from your “mental totality”, and that simply doesn’t make sense!