A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by David Turell , Monday, June 11, 2018, 15:49 (2144 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Of course things exist even if not observed. The photons carry the image as information, and it becomes an image only upon observation.

dhw: So if I didn’t see the sun, the stars, the bus, they would only be a potential image? We agree that they exist, and so all you are saying is that we are only aware of them when we are aware of them – not that they don’t exist until we are aware of them. This is all irrelevant to the theory that I am proposing, which suggests that if there is such a thing as an immaterial soul, it exists as the product of materials, just as the immaterial image of materials continues to exist even when their material source is no longer there. And I suggest that this would explain such psychic phenomena as ghosts and déjà vu, but of course it does not mean that the soul would live on as a thinking being – that is a matter of faith.

DAVID: Still smells like pure materialism to me. Photon light waves carry immaterial information but photon light waves themselves are something real.

dhw: A theory that allows for the existence of God and for the survival of an immaterial form of conscious energy can hardly be called “pure materialism”. You seem to have almost cottoned on to the dualistic analogy I have offered, except that I am referring to the material realities (sun, stars, bus) that have produced the photons that carry the immaterial information.The bus and the theoretical physicist were real. Millions of years later, the accident can still be seen. The immaterial image survives the disappearance of the material reality that produced it, and this may be the case with the soul (hence ghosts and déjà vu), possibly extending to the soul continuing to think (but that is a matter of faith).

I see the sun nine minutes after the light left it. I make the assumption it is still there when I see it. You theory is still having immaterial information produced by a material object, the sun. No real explanation for consciousness except pure materialism.