A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE chemical problems (Identity)

by David Turell , Monday, August 13, 2018, 19:31 (2083 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: A material brain that creates a soul could also come from your God. But if you wish to go back to your theory that the soul is a piece of God’s consciousness, then may I suggest that it makes sense for a piece of God’s consciousness to be conscious.

DAVID: My consciousness is not God's consciousness, I think my soul provides a way to reach consciousness from a material brain. If I had a direct connection to God’s consciousness faith in God would not be needed. I would have direct knowledge of God.

dhw: ... So what IS your soul? You refuse to accept the definition that it is the immaterial part of your self which contains all your immaterial attributes - e.g. consciousness, the ability to think, to feel, to process information, to make decisions (free will) – and you say it is a copy of yourself which “provides a way to reach consciousness from a material brain”.

This is our difference. I know the soul is me as an immaterial essence. I know I think using my brain to create thought. We know electricity is activated in the frontal cortex of the brain when I think. My solution to consciousness is the soul provides an interpretive mechanism for the material electricity that we know exists during thought. I hear my thoughts in words, not electrical buzzing.

dhw: If you think consciousness comes “from” a material brain, you are caught between your belief in a conscious immaterial soul and the “material side of the problem which you refuse to recognize”.

But that is not my thought. I recognize the issue, I think more fully than you do because you have a pre-formed rigid concept of soul, when we have yet to agree on what the soul is, which is what I admit I am struggling with, knowing the presentation of the material side. We recognize consciousness, but when we look of the brain all we see is electricity. How does the electricity convert to consciousness is the continuing 'hard' problem. I think my soul offers a mechanism of translation.

DAVID: You and I have stated we think with our brains. Start your thinking about consciousness from that point.

dhw: I have stated that in dualism, the soul uses the brain for information and material expression of its thoughts. I start my thinking about consciousness from two points: 1) if the soul exists, it would have no function unless it was conscious, i.e. able to think. 2) If there is no such thing as a soul, the brain does the thinking.

I view the soul's thought as developing from initial birth when there is no thought, and no circuits for memory developed just as I did from birth.

dhw: If the soul is the immaterial thinking self that survives the death of the brain, then of course it creates thought! And so it uses the brain for information and material expression, not for the actual process of thinking (just as in your afterlife it thinks without the brain).

DAVID: I think the soul is immaterial and plays different roles in life and death, which are completely different, and require differences.

dhw: No one would disagree that life and death are different. Why should that mean that the soul plays different roles? If it is the immaterial, thinking, feeling, remembering etc. self in death, why shouldn’t it be the thinking, feeling, remembering etc. self in life? The difference is that in death it now uses different means of observing and communicating in a different “reality”. But it is still the same immaterial self that it was in life, as NDE patients confirm.

NDE folks do have a continuity. The difference I see between us is that in death I see the soul as an observer. No new concepts are developed, but points of view are discussed telepathically. It is obvious soul/consciousness survives clinical death, but in death I see the soul as operating differently than in life.

DAVID: In an NDE the soul observes the afterlife and then when it comes back to a living brain, electricity appears which sre the thoughts the soul presents to you about the experience, and interprets the electricity as conscious thought. We know the presence of electricity must return.

dhw: How can the soul possibly not be conscious of what it experienced without the brain during the NDE? The soul (if it exists) activates the living brain. Why does it need the brain’s electricity to become conscious of the experience it has just consciously had?

Because that is what is observed when they revive brain function. Only then do they learn what happened on the other side. They cannot learn about it without the functional brain. The soul in death is totally disconnected from the soul in life. You are trying to subscribe to some sort of continuity in realms.