A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 18, 2018, 11:53 (2102 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] Moving into the afterlife, I summarized your new theory as follows:
dhw: 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.

DAVID: Has to be if the brain is gone.

dhw: But where do the thoughts come from if there is no brain? The soul does the thinking in English. There is no translating. And that can be used as evidence that in life the soul does the thinking in English. Telepathy is the method by which the soul communicates with other souls.

DAVID: I/soul initiates a thought which ends up as wet ions, and must come back out to my mind as intelligible words.

dhw: If, as you have agreed, your soul speaks English, then it initiates thought in English. It doesn’t need to change it into wet ions which return to the soul to be translated into the English in which it originated (first version).

DAVID: I'll chop up your thoughts/interpretations to reply: my point is my soul must use the wet ions to think. you refuse to entertain the idea of the reality that exists.

You have not “chopped up” my interpretations. You have ignored all the inconsistencies that I have pointed out in your own account of the process. I do not reject the existence of wet ions. I reject the – for me unintelligible – argument that the soul, which thinks in English, has to transfer its thoughts to wet ions before the wet ions bring them back to the soul to have them translated into English (first version), and I reject the idea that the English-speaking soul’s thoughts turn into wet ions, and the wet ions translate them into English so that the English-speaking soul can understand them (second version).

dhw: Your second version has the soul thinking unintelligible thoughts (so it doesn’t speak English), which apparently the wet ions translate into English so that the soul can understand what it was thinking – which means that now the soul does speak English!

DAVID: Foolish response. Of course my soul thinks in English thru the agency of the wet ions.

What does “thru the agency” mean? Is your dualist’s soul, which initiates and develops thought, only able to think in English because of electrical charges? How does it manage to think in English in the afterlife without its electrical charges? Or do you mean it’s only able to think through wet ions? So how does it think in the afterlife without its wet ions?
Look at what you agree to below: “In death, English speaking soul continues to think intelligible thoughts in English.” It continues to do in death what it did in life.

dhw: Let’s start again. The dualistic process I propose to you is this: soul initiates thought in English using information provided by brain; sends message to brain to give material expression to thought; ongoing process whereby brain sends information to soul, and soul develops thought in English according to whatever information it is given to think about.

DAVID: Once again in your view a separate soul uses a distinctly separate brain. I view my soul as my immaterial doppelganger which uses the wet ions to process its thoughts and translate them as they are completed.

The dualist’s soul and brain are housed together and work together, each fulfilling its own functions. See below for the rest.

dhw: In death, English-speaking soul continues to think intelligible thoughts in English, but uses psychic means to gather information and uses telepathy instead of brain in order to communicate with others.

DAVID: That is the only part you have gotten correct about my views.

If you accept that the English-speaking soul continues to think intelligible thoughts in English, we can do away with the idea that in life it is incapable of thinking intelligible thoughts in English unless it puts them into wet ions which either translate them back into English (one version) or bring them back to the soul to get the soul to translate them back into English (the other version).

dhw: Materialism: the brain thinks. Mystery, as described in your post: we have no idea how electrical charges from within the brain create thought.

I’m sorry you didn’t comment on this, since you actually claim in one of your versions that “wet ions produce intelligible thought”.

dhw: Now without going through the wet ions/translation theory again, please simply tell me which of the above points you disagree with.

DAVID: Most of it.

So you reject the proposal that the dualist’s English-speaking soul uses information from the brain, initiates thoughts in English, and sends messages to the brain to give its thoughts material expression.