A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE chemical problems (Identity)

by dhw, Friday, August 10, 2018, 11:13 (2078 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I/soul think with my brain…

dhw: Same old mantra: my soul thinks with (or “uses”) my brain, but you won’t tell us what the use is, other than for information and material expression.

DAVID: I don't understand what else you want. In life I use my brain to create thought. As me my soul does also.

dhw: You don’t want to understand what else I want. If the soul is conscious, as you keep saying it is (though then you keep saying that it isn’t), it must be able to think and therefore doesn’t need the brain to create consciousness/to think!

DAVID: This is our disagreement. I theorize that since the soul is me it uses the brain to think as I do.

Same again. Why “as I do”? Why do you compare your soul to you if your soul IS you? And you still refuse to tell me HOW the soul “uses” the brain to think, other than for information and material expression.

DAVID: I think my material body/ brain has free will.

dhw: That is a real surprise to me. Your body/brain now makes all the decisions. Frankly, if the soul can’t think without the brain, and if the brain makes the decisions, determines how intelligent we are (your Einstein example), and rearranges itself in order to preserve its powers of cognition (non-Egnor non-example of dualism), what do you need a soul for?

DAVID: My soul is me. My body and brain are me. I use my brain to think and make free will decisions. So does my soul as me. You sure get confused. I've never changed my view of how it works in life.

Again you ignore the question and repeat the mantras. We agree that your soul, body and brain are you. So the rest of your post means that your body and brain and soul use your body and brain to think and so does your soul as your body/brain and soul (“so does my soul as me”), and although your body and brain have free will, your soul and body and brain use your brain to make free will. Yes, I sure do get confused. How it works in life has included the soul initiating thought although the brain creates thought, a piece of God’s consciousness not being conscious until the brain makes electric waves, the soul thinking its thoughts and translating them into electric waves which then come to the soul so that it can translate them back into thoughts, and the soul being a copy of you which IS you, as below:

DAVID: I view the soul as an immaterial copy of me, existing along with me but on the quantum side of the wall of uncertainty. In the afterlife the soul return to the quantum realm where the afterlife is. But the soul and I are never separate or separated by the wall.

dhw: “You” (soul and body/brain) lead a strange life! There’s the material you doing all the thinking and making all the decisions (a copy can hardly do the thinking, can it?)…

DAVID: But I've said all along my soul and I are the same and work as the same entity.

dhw: So now we have a copy of you, which is on the quantum side of reality, being the same as you and working as one, except that the copy of you doesn’t have free will, because it is your body/brain that has free will.

DAVID: My soul is me and is not helpless any more than I am.

If it doesn’t have free will, then it is at the mercy of the brain and body. As I pointed out on the Egnor thread, if only you would recognize the dichotomy in your own thinking, as you try to reconcile your dualism with your materialism, you would not be forced into any of these convolutions.
The problem is straightforward! Dualism divides us into soul and body/brain, with the soul comprising all our immaterial attributes (including consciousness and the ability to think), and for those who believe in an afterlife, the soul lives on with all those attributes. But against this are the findings of materialists who seize on the indisputable influence of the body/brain on those immaterial attributes and believe that eventually they will be able to prove that the body/brain are responsible for all those attributes. I don’t know why you refuse to consider the possibility that the materialists are right, but the material mechanisms may be (it is only a hypothesis) capable of producing the immaterial self that dualists believe in. This hypothesis allows for whatever faith you wish to embrace.