A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by dhw, Monday, July 16, 2018, 12:19 (2111 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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 happens.

dhw: I had no idea that your English-speaking thoughts were unintelligible to your English-speaking soul until your English-speaking soul had "initiated them into wet ions" (no chance then of the afterlife soul thinking intelligible thoughts), which then brought them back to your English-speaking soul to translate them back into the English in which they started (though since last week apparently the thoughts coming out of the wet ions are intelligible, in which case they don’t need to be translated after all).

DAVID: Finally. Welcome to my thinking for the first time. We know full well we think with our brain. The hard issue has always been how are wet ions running round between neurons translatable into understandable immaterial thought.

I’m flabbergasted and rather depressed that you regard the above as an accurate account of your thinking! And I’m astonished that someone who claims to be a dualist believes that thought is sent to the soul in electrical discharges by what used to be the passive recipient brain, and that what used to be the active thinking soul is now the passive receiver whose job is to translate the unintelligible thoughts electrically discharged from the now thinking brain into English. Why don’t you just have the brain thinking in English and forget about the soul? Ah, but then there’s your afterlife, as below…

DAVID: I have always proposed the soul has a mechanism for doing that. It develops the thought using the wet ions and then at the finish it brings the thought out into our minds which also are immaterial, but which we can reach through the soul. In death, rejoining the universal consciousness, it has the new mechanism of telepathy to handle thought translation.

Dualism = the self consists of soul and body/brain. We and the mind and the soul are one, and the wet ions are produced by the brain. So apparently you have always proposed that the soul develops thought out of the brain and then the soul brings the thought into the soul so that our soul can reach the thought through the soul. And in death the soul uses telepathy to translate into English the thoughts which the now non-existent wet ions carry from the now non-existent brain to the soul.

dhw: The soul gathers information from the brain and then sends instructions to the brain to express/implement its thoughts. What other use does the soul make of the brain (apart from your new and unintelligible wet ion translation theory)?

DAVID: My wet ions are reality. The soul uses those wet ion to create and produce thought. That is the material side of dualism.

Of course they are reality. And the thinking soul uses them as stated above. But your account of the process does not show the soul using them to create and produce thought. It shows the brain creating and producing thought and sending its wet ions to the soul, which translates the thought into English. And you have forgotten everything you wrote before about the soul being the initiator of thought, and the brain “does not initiate or contribute” because it is the passive “recipient of the working soul’s output”. Do you really think your English-speaking soul initiates its thoughts unintelligibly, and needs to have them transformed into unintelligible electrical signals which it then translates back into the English they started in? And ditto with each subsequent development? Once more, I beg of your soul to stop putting this theory into your wet ions, or I beg of your wet ions to stop carrying this theory to your soul.