A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Three (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, May 26, 2018, 11:27 (2156 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: My attempt at reconciliation [between materialism and dualism] encompasses both approaches, removes all the contradictions arising out of your own illogical theory summarized above, and is compatible with theism and with atheism. I would still like to know if there are any flaws in its logic.
DAVID: I keep repeating your static soul as as starting point keeps your thoughts logical. Since the soul exists in two situations that are totally different, I disagree with your starting point of a static soul, unchanging in form in life and death. Your grudging admission that it works slightly differently in death is not the sort of difference I'm proposing.

But you haven’t proposed a different form, although I keep asking you to do so. I have accepted that methods of observation and communication must be different, and I have vehemently denied that the soul is static, because even in life it continually changes with experience, and so of course if it leaves the material world and enters an immaterial world it will exist in two totally different situations and will be subjected to new experiences. But you keep agreeing that it is the SAME thinking soul, i.e. it is the immaterial you or me. So what “difference” are you proposing?

DAVID: You keep repeating my thoughts are illogical as if that makes the point true. They are only illogical if only your basic starting assumptions are true and no one knows if they are. You insist upon your assumptions because mine lead to my explanation about the larger frontal lobes in evolution of humans.

Firstly, they are not basic starting assumptions. They are conclusions drawn from conflicting facts, some of which support materialism while others support dualism. I can find no logic in your belief that the same immaterial soul (your immaterial self/soul/consciousness) cannot THINK without a material brain in life but can go on THINKING without a material brain in death. I accept the possibility that if your God exists, he may have expanded the frontal lobe to enable humans to think new thoughts, but the idea that the brain is the source of thought is pure materialism, and so directly contradicts your dualistic belief in an s/s/c (a conscious, thinking soul) which remains its conscious thinking self without the brain. I have offered a theistic way out of this illogicality by proposing (theistic version) that your God designed a mechanism whereby the immaterial soul may emerge from materials and may survive, just as images can survive the disappearance of the materials that gave rise to them. I do not insist on it, but I offer it for discussion. And so far you have failed to come up with any criticism of its logic.