A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, May 12, 2018, 11:02 (2169 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This sentence of yours is problematic: "And a theist can argue that his God has created this material mechanism to produce a form of conscious energy like his own, which will live on and may even lead a new life." This sounds like pure materialism to me, as you are having the brain produce consciousness by God's design, so consciousness has a material basis only. How does it survive death, if brain dependent? You seem to have God coming and taking it away with Him when death occurs, while my approach has them always separate (brain/consciousness), but required to work intimately together in life.

Your question “How does it survive if brain dependent?” is what I keep asking you when you tell us over and over again that the soul is brain dependent in life! Time after time, when I try to explain dualism to you, you have accused me of separating the soul from the brain in life, because you insist that the soul cannot think without the brain. My sentence SUPPORTS your argument, but it is a direct contradiction of “pure dualism”. The contradictions that riddle your materialistic version of dualism can be resolved by the sentence you have quoted, which changes the conventional basis of dualism by making the "soul" the immaterial product of the brain. Humans are striving to create a material being that can emulate all the attributes of a human. My theistic version suggests that your God has done precisely that: we are a material being whose materials have produced the consciousness of which he himself is composed. He doesn’t “come and take it away” (which is virtually the same as your idea that it “returns to God”). It has its own identity as a form of energy which (just like light waves) survives the passing of the materials that have produced it and, if NDEs are anything to go by, is capable of new experiences in a different, immaterial world. However, let me emphasize that I am only offering this possibility in order to show that my theory can incorporate your theistic beliefs. I remain neutral on the subject of an afterlife.