A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by dhw, Saturday, June 23, 2018, 10:45 (2134 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have no problem with the software/soul entering the computer/brain, but you know as well as I do that the transistors do not CREATE the programme/thought: they help to give it material implementation/expression. Hence the relevance of software/hardware as an analogy to the dualist concept of mind/body.

DAVID: Of course the transistors express the thought. But since I own my brain and use it to express thought I think it requires more than the complex brain networks to do it. It requires a consciousness software which is part of the universal consciousness. Once again you have ignored my full theory, in order to claim it is materialism!

“I” = your dualist’s soul. Yes, your dualist’s soul uses your brain to express thought. In your next sentence what requires more than the brain to do what? All your references to “it” are very confusing. However, you keep telling us that the soul requires the brain to do its thinking. So what requires the consciousness software (soul) to do what? Let’s start again: the consciousness software, which you believe to be part of the universal consciousness - also known as a separate consciousness mechanism or a piece of God’s consciousness – does the thinking, as you agreed when telling us that it was responsible for “introspection and conceptualization”, and it requires the brain to do the expressing and implementing, as you agreed when telling us that your software mind uses the hardware computer to give its thoughts a material form. What could be clearer?

dhw: WHY do you deem it impossible for the dualist’s soul to do the thinking in life, while the dualist’s brain does the expressing/implementing, and then for the same dualist’s soul to go on thinking in death (though changing its mode of observation and communication)?

DAVID: You persist in presenting a static soul thinking mechanism, unchanged in life and death insofar as it thinks. I'm not arguing the reception of information which definitely requires the brain's input in life. But in death we both agree the telepathic reception of information and thought requires a different mechanism. So why can't thought operate differently in death, using a part of the universal consciousness?

You persist in telling us the mechanism HAS to change because the soul HAS to depend on the brain for its ability to think, and I keep asking you WHY, but you never answer. According to you the soul, the SEPARATE consciousness mechanism, is ALREADY a part of the universal consciousness, or a piece of God’s consciousness which he inserts into the brain. What purpose can it have, if not to think? WHY should a piece of God’s consciousness only be able to think when it is attached to a brain, and yet the same “SEPARATE consciousness mechanism” or part of the universal consciousness or piece of God’s consciousness can continue to think when it leaves the brain? Leaving the brain would only mean leaving its material means of observing and expressing, which we have agreed.

DAVID: I see my theories as equal to your theories, which you present as a defense against my bigger brain produces more advanced thought theory about the evolution of the human brain.

It is not a defence of anything. It is an attack on the idea that a duality of mind/soul and body/brain depends on the brain for its capacity to think. If the brain produces thought, you have materialism, but I have offered you a compromise which removes this discrepancy! I’m reluctant to let this get lost in all the fluff, so here it is again, and again I invite you to find fault with it. Logically the expanding cell communities of the bigger brain can only “produce more advanced thought” if they are the source of thought. And so what we call the soul may be a form of energy that emerges from the thinking brain and not only transcends the thought powers of each individual cell/cell community (as we see in other forms of communal intelligence) but may also survive its source (as we see with images that survive their source). Hence such psychic phenomena as ghosts and déjà vu, and possibly even ongoing survival in an afterlife, though that remains a matter of faith. All perfectly compatible with theism, if one attributes the design of the mechanism to your God.

However, in fairness to “pure” dualism, I find no logical discrepancy in the theistic theory that your God puts a piece of his consciousness into the brain to do the thinking – i.e. to absorb and process information delivered by the brain, and to instruct the brain to give material expression to its thoughts – and the same separate consciousness mechanism or piece of your God’s consciousness continues to be its thinking self when the brain dies. Can you, as a dualist and theist, find any logical flaw in that theory? If not, why do you see any logical NEED for the soul first to depend on the brain for its ability to think, and then to develop some vaguely different kind of ability to think in death?