A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 14, 2018, 19:07 (2105 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Where does gibberish fit in?

dhw: If the ions bring material thoughts from your material brain to your immaterial soul (which is supposed to have initiated them in English anyway!), and the soul has to translate them into English before your soul can understand the material thoughts in order to make them immaterial, the thoughts carried by the ions must be gibberish, i.e. incomprehensible in their wet “material” form. If I were a dualist, I would believe that the soul thinks its immaterial thoughts in English and sends them to the brain in order to give them material expression.

I/soul initiate thought into wet ions, where they become electrical charges. They come out from the wet ions as intelligible thought. This is the process you keep skipping in your separatist approach to soul/brain mechanisms. This is what we don't understand, but we know it haoppens.

dhw: We have long since agreed that if there is such a thing as a soul, it is housed in the brain and is “interlocked” with it. But the soul and the brain perform different functions - that is the sense in which they are separate.

They function together as described above and are not separate as they work.

DAVID: …but that does not imply the brain is totally in control which would be true materialism. I/soul control the brain. Control of the process is the real issue.

dhw: Of course the dualist’s soul is in control. It is the soul that initiates the thought, uses the brain to develop the thought, and continually issues instructions to what you call the passive, recipient brain, which gives them material expression. That is the nature of dualism. No disagreement.

DAVID: Do you really mean the 'soul uses the brain to develop thought', that means it uses the networks to construct/form thought, or will you scurry back to 'express' thought, your usual refuge. Thought I'd use your debate terminology.

dhw: I have spelt this out a hundred times in analysing YOUR terminology. The dualist’s soul uses the brain to provide the information it thinks about (why have you left that out?). Example of information provided by brain: me hungry, me see living meat. The soul initiates the concept of a spear. It therefore uses the brain and body to construct a spear, but then the brain supplies more information (spear no kill living meat; something wrong with concept), and so the soul does some more thinking (i.e. develops the thought: need sharper stone, longer shaft, better aim) and sends more instructions to the brain to do more implementing, and so on until the thought or concept is complete and the material implementation is complete (spear kill animal). That is how the dualist’s soul “uses the dualist’s brain to develop thought”: two parts of the self – the thinking part (soul) and the information-gathering, expressing/implementing part (brain) working in harmony.

In all of this hominin exposition you have not said the soul uses the brain's networks to produce and think the thoughts about the spear. You have the soul imparting thought to the brain. That is your 'interlock' concept. As for the source of information, I've said over and over the brain supplies all of the five sensory details needed.