A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two; addendum (Identity)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 21, 2018, 20:31 (2096 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: In your view the soul seems to be a separate mechanism from you or me.

dhw: I keep repeating that in dualism the self consists of two parts: mind/soul and body/brain. In life they are inseparable, but they have different functions.

DAVID: This has always been my theory: My soul is an exact immaterial image of me.

dhw:Your soul IS you!

Of course it is. And it works with the brain just as material me does.

DAVID: It works just like I do. I think with my brain in material life, and the soul think right along with me ( because it is me!) using the brain…

dhw: So why do you keep distinguishing between your soul and you? You keep agreeing that the soul part of “you” initiates thought. You keep saying it uses the brain, and I keep repeating that it uses the brain to acquire information and give thought material expression. You have never found any other functions it performs, except for this new “translation” idea, as below.

You seem surprised as what happens in the brain when thought occurs! It is represented by electric waves running around the networks!

DAVID: ….except in my view the soul solves the problem of translating thought into electrical pulses over networks of neurons from thought into electricity and back to thought, and it does this because it is part of universal consciousness.

dhw: What problem? If the English-speaking soul is the initiator of thought, and thinks its thought in English, why must it translate it into neurons, and then translate the neurons back into the English of the thought it initiated “because it is part of universal consciousness”?

Because we all know that on the material side all thought is represented by ions.

DAVID: My soul contains my immaterial memories, my knowledge, my ego defense mechanisms in exactly the way that in my material life those attributes of consciousness exist as immaterial yet in words material descriptions of who I am.

dhw: Yes, your soul contains all those attributes of consciousness, and you agree that it thinks in English. The material expression is what it uses the brain for.

And I say as me, the soul uses the brain just as I do, for creation of thought.

DAVID: In death the soul is more connected to the universal consciousness, and can now observe and think and telepathically transmit thought.

dhw: In dualistic life it is the body and brain that observe and pass the information to the soul, which initiates and develops thought and which uses the brain to express thought materially. In death there is no dualism, and the soul uses psychic means to observe and communicate. You have agreed to all of this in the past.

Forget the past. What I present has always been my view. I've brought out the ions because of what I think of your garbled view of the role of the soul. The soul is me and we both use the brain to think as one.

DAVID: This theory recognizes the duality of the problem. And it is not a change in belief; it is a deeper recognition of the consciousness problem in attempting to debate the issue where you keep separating me/soul from my brain.

dhw: They are not separated. If the soul exists, it resides within the brain, and the two work together exercising their different functions. Nobody has ever solved the “consciousness problem”. Hence the continued debate between materialism and dualism, and my attempt to reconcile the two approaches. I can find no logic in your repeated acknowledgement that the soul initiates thoughts in English and yet has to translate them into wet ions so that it can translate them back again into English.

I might ask: is your soul an exact representation of your mind, personality structure and consciousness? I view my soul as just that, an immaterial me which I contain in life. and since I contain it, it works just like me with the brain because it is me, and the brain is where thoughts originate when I put them there. In other words my soul is me, just as you have pointed out.