Consciousness: Egnor on dualism: another example (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 02, 2018, 15:22 (2095 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTE: "By studying the boy’s brain and behaviour for three years following his surgery, the team could see which parts of his brain were able to recover. Remarkably, they found that his intellect, visual perception, and face and object recognition skills were all normal for his age."

DAVID: Egnor is right. The mind is immaterial. When an adult has a stroke that destroys part of the visual cortex they do lose part of their field of vision, just as this child, which shows that the mind must depend on the brain circuits. But the boy maintained some higher-level functions It means the mind/soul must use the recovered and existing brain circuits to function.

dhw: I can find no mention here of an immaterial mind. The only hint I can find is in the above, where he mentions intellect, but everything else is concerned with observation of the material world. Yes, the mind depends on the brain for provision of information. If the brain readjusts itself and the mind remains “normal”, then either the mind has reorganized the brain (dualism), or the brain has reorganized itself in order to produce the same “normal” mind (materialism).

DAVID: I was referring back to Egnor's previously presented article. We know the brain mechanically reorganized as the illustrations show.

dhw: So either the mind reorganized it (dualism), or it reorganized itself in order to produce the same “normal” mind (materialism).

A six year old cannot tell his mind to think I must redo my surgically destroyed lobes so I maintain my IQ. We know it happens automatically with brain plasticity, but I can understand the mind/soul containing a mechanism of direction for plasticity.

See this article on the boy:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/case-study-boy-loses-huge-brain-section-his-iq-goes-up

“Our results favour dynamic reorganisation and fine-tuning in the functional architecture of cognition ... and argue for the critical role of experience in shaping the underlying circuitry,” the researchers write.

One function, however, was not regained. The boy, now 11, is unable to see things in the left half of his visual field, something the researchers say relates to those circuits being “established and fixed at an early age”.

They also note that in a recent review of similar cases, published by two of the authors, recoveries weren’t nearly so promising. They suggest the boy’s case may have been helped by the fact his pre-operative cognitive function was at a high level, and that his slow-growing tumour gave the brain enough time to re-home some of those visual tasks.

The boy remains seizure-free with an IQ of 118, comparable to his pre-surgical score of 116.