A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, June 09, 2018, 10:49 (2138 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The question is whether things exist independently of our consciousness. Your quantum theory maintains that they do not. If the image doesn’t exist without my seeing it, then your God, you and the bus don’t exist either without my seeing them.

DAVID: Of course the photons exist, and are real. But it takes reception of them to interpret their carried information.

My reconciliation between materialism and dualism is that something immaterial can survive its material source, as we know from images surviving the materials that produce them. You replied: “Problem: there is no image until a consciousness sees it. It is all a potential image before that, photons which carry information.”

You said there was no image, so my analogy didn’t work. Do you or do you not believe that things exist independently of our observation of them? If the photons containing the image are real, then the image they contain is real, whether I observe it or not. I don't see the relevance of your quantum theory, let alone how it invalidates the analogy. However, I'd better repeat that I am not championing the theory of an immortal soul. I am simply offering a way in which materialism CAN be reconciled with dualism.

I have transferred the second part of your post to “Introducing the brain”.