Why does the soul need the brain seems like a logical question especially in the context of the belief held by the leading ID proponent of the Discovery Institute Michael Egnor. He has written extensively on the theme of the immaterial soul that, in his view, is an independent entity, separate of the human body. What Dr. Egnor consistently fails to acknowledge is the obvious connection or interdependence between a functioning brain and self-awareness or consciousness. I wrote about it here.
If certain parts of human brain are damaged or disabled, just like in case of general anesthesia, the human brain loses the sense of consciousness or self-awareness either permanently or temporarily. The immaterial soul fails to make up for the damaged or disabled brain…
Dr. Egnor’s personal experiences (and he has many) as a neurosurgeon convinced him that many people, including many of his patients, with the great majority of their brains missing have developed and function normally. Egnor is convinced that an immaterial soul makes up for the loss of brain mass that is responsible for normal brain function in people with normal brain size or no damage to any of the brain parts.
It appears Dr. Egnor believes that unlike a computer software that can’t function without the computer hardware, human brain has an ability to make up for the loss of the hardware with the computer software – the immaterial soul.
Is Dr. Egnor’s view consistent with the readily available facts?
I personally see Dr. Egnor building and supporting a strawman by his selective choice of facts…Hey! That’s my opinion and that’s why we have this blog full of experts to disagree with me or Dr. Egnor…(I kinda like the guy though).
Let’s see…First off, not all cases of patients with missing parts of their brains experience the supposed miraculous saving powers of the immaterial soul. It appears that the amount of the missing part of the brain mass doesn’t seem to matter… What seems to matter more is which part (s) of the brain is missing and not how much of the brain mass is actually missing. Some parts of the brain seem essential for consciousness and self-awareness and others do not.
However, the main point of this OP is:
<strong> Why does the soul need the brain? Or why would human body need a brain at all, if the immaterial soul has an ability to compensate for the brain losses?
If the software (the soul) can operate without the hardware (the brain) why do we even need the brain in the first place?</strong>
It seems like a faulty or at least a wasteful design to me…
I have not been convinced that there is such an acceleration of expansion.
Some of us have a different idea as to the source of histrionics.
Mung,
No, because when I talk about Superman and Middle Earth, I am talking about things that don’t exist. Superman and Middle Earth aren’t real, and since they aren’t real, they obviously have no physical existence.
Representations of Superman and Middle Earth can be real and physical, however.
From what little I understand, Hegel is concerned to overcome Kant by radicalizing him: he wants to show that we cannot help ourselves to the dichotomies that Kant used to destroy dogmatic metaphysics without becoming dogmatic metaphysicians ourselves, so the critique of dogmatic metaphysics (the Transcendental Dialectic) applies just as much the tools used to construct that critique (in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic).
So while Hegel does take Kant as a central figure to overcome, I wouldn’t say that makes Hegel a Kantian. Besides which Hegel’s response to Kant is mediated by German Idealism (Fichte and Schelling) and German Romanticism (Holderlin, Hamann, Herder, Jacobi). It’s all really complicated and I don’t even know the details.
Or Sellars extracts. Or vanilla extract.
Frankly, I don’t believe you. All you have to do is label it a “representation” and it becomes physical. After all, we’ve seen you do this in this very thread.
What is there that you could not just so label and therefore deny there is anything nonphysical about it?
ok, that made me laugh.
But you have been convinced that the universe is expanding?
So you were wrong and walto won the debate and you lost the debate. Why can’t you just admit it?
Then walto can keep that in his win jar and pull it out every so often and beat you with it. Remember that time i won and you lost? Do you really think this time is going to be any different?
I see your point. Perhaps I should have said “while observing” instead of “by observing”.
But that leads to the question of just how much, if any, observation of the external world a person needs to develop geometry or math. Perhaps not very much.
How is this different from what keiths is trying to do?
What is the “representation of Superman” a representation of? According to keiths it’s a representation of nothing. It’s referent does not exist. Per keiths.
Neil Rickert is innocent!!!
But I don’t know what I would be, without my sarcasm.
Excellent point. Life is pretty much all about matching patterns.
I’m having the paint removed from my win jar. I’ve found that I really want to see the wins without having to open it, and the 14 carat gold paint, while pretty, has ended up mostly annoying me. It’s hard to get off, but there’s a company around here that says they can do it without damaging the jar, and they better, because that thing cost me an arm and a leg–even without the expense of having it painted!!
Given that you believe only physical things exist and are real, saying they have no physical existence is redundant, don’t you think?
Or do you say they do have a non-physical existence?
Not mine!
Mine almost never match: you can ask my wife.
Mung,
They have “intentional inexistence.”
Will you be starting the Free Neil Rickert movement?
No.
Don’t have to lose your sarcasm, I don’t think–though I really should ask Bruce.
https://theelectricagora.com/author/danny9168/
Alan Fox,
Thanks. Neil beat you to it, though.
walto,
No worries. Had a busy day dry-walling then Tour de France so just playing catch-up!
As I see it, arithmetic arose as an idealization of counting. And geometry arose as an idealization of measuring (particularly, using a portable measuring rod).
Returning to your original theme of aliens observing the earth, one might expect them to develop a spherical geometry rather than a plane geometry — unless they were aliens from a flat alien-earth culture. However, plane geometry idealizes more readily than does spherical geometry.
Really? You don’t base your actions on previous experience? *shock*
I wonder how a reductive physicalist would write that article. Would they speak of brains rather than minds?
Would they address the problem of reverse interaction?
How does a physical brain conjure up or construct something that is not physical and not real and which does not exist, such that it can then create a representation of it?
Why not just call what is conjured up a physical and real entity rather than adding a middle man called a “representation.” Poor Ockham.
How does it not? Brain activity is real. What the brain appears to do is to model reality, match patterns, if you like.
That seems right.
“flat alien-earth culture” LOL !
Careful, you might inspire a new branch of Scientology.
So Superman and Middle Earth are actually real and the brain just modeled them?
Cool bro.
As both KN and I have frequently noted in response to your questions about this, problems surrounding intentionality are very old, quite difficult, and very popular in philosophy. The classic writings on it are by Brentano, but it continues to generate voluminous writings by contemporary philosophers, including KN.
The thing you need to keep in mind is that they don’t go away for non-physicalists. They’re still there, just as hard.
Mung,
It doesn’t. The brain constructs representations, not things-that-don’t-exist.
I think you need to write it another 500 times:
Speculations are fine and we could go on:
Is information physical, such as QI? Is whatever is ‘transferred’ between entangled sub particles? Is time? How about consciousness?
Alan:
Mung:
“Fire Neil Rickert” would be more appropriate.
He still hasn’t corrected (or even acknowledged) his latest moderation screwup.
Mung,
Yes, but when addressing the student at the bottom of the class, redundancy is often helpful.
Mung,
Let’s give this a try. It’s a dumbed-down version of “the representation is distinct from the referent”:
keiths,
Twat!
Alan,
Walto’s comment did not violate any rules and should not have been guanoed.
Neil fucked up. It was his mistake, and it’s his responsibility to correct it.
For laughs, would you care to defend his decision? Or do you acknowledge that he screwed up?
For the record:
Walto requested the move.
I declined.
Walto repeated the request. Then I moved it.
keiths,
Boring….
The representation is just a middle man. According to you it doesn’t actual refer to or represent anything. It refers to or represents nothing. It’s nonsensical.
And no, your representations are not maps. Or models.
A map, obviously, maps to something. However well or however poorly. In your world, you have maps that map to nothing at all. That’s nonsensical.
Same with models.
You made a distinction where, according to you, there is none. How pointless is that? And telling.
No. Employing redundancy is not the same thing as drawing a distinction.
This stuff is way above your pay grade, Mung.
Keiths and I are both nominalists. That’s one of the few things we agree on. With respect to the present discussion, the two main differences between our positions are (1) he thinks it’s useful to use the word “physical” to describe his nominalism, whereas I don’t find that term helpful in this context; (2) keiths is a meaning internalist, and I’m not. (This is why he finds something oddly compelling about Cartesian skepticism and I don’t.)
As I see it — returning to my discussion with BruceS in this thread — we have pretty good philosophical reasons for thinking that some version of semantic externalism is true, so the challenge is to find a scientific theory that explains it.
I do understand BruceS’s reservations about appeals to causal history as a way of determining content but there could be ways of getting around that worry. I just don’t know.
I don’t have a worked-out theory of fictional entities, but I’m inclined to say that when I think about Superman, I’m having thoughts about the cultural icon that was invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and which has become one of the most enduring American superheroes, who was portrayed in various TV shows and films, etc. So in that sense, of course Superman does exist.
Moreover: if I say that Superman’s alter ego is Bruce Wayne, I’ve said something false and will be met with howls of derision from all nerds within earshot. It’s false that Superman is Bruce Wayne, it’s false that Santa Claus lives at the South Pole, it’s false to say that Sherlock Holmes lived in Gloucester, etc. We can and do say true things and false things about fictional entities.
To say that “Superman doesn’t exist” seems not quite right to me if given a strictly literal reading. In everyday language we use sentences like “Superman doesn’t exist” or “Santa Claus isn’t real” to mean “there does not exist in the actual world anyone who satisfies the concepts ‘Superman’ or ‘Santa Claus’ as specified in the stories about them.”
My map of the world includes mermaids, vampires, and unicorns — it includes them as fictional entities. If my map of the world didn’t include them, I couldn’t understand what someone was talking about when she used those words.
Well then, fortunately for me, I did not say that it was.
Neil,
Right. You screwed up by moving a non-rule-violating comment to Guano.
We’ve been over this already:
Expected response from Neil:
You caved in to walto, just as you caved in to Alan. Show some spine for a change.
You screwed up. You moved the comment to Guano. It was your mistake, and it’s your responsibility to fix it.
KN,
I think it’s silly of you to avoid the adjective “physical” when you’ve confirmed that you do in fact believe that everything, including values, thoughts, and meanings, is physical — particularly in a thread where the truth of physicalism is being debated!
What I find compelling about Cartesian skepticism is that the arguments for it are solid, and no one has refuted them. You’ve acknowledged that you can’t refute them, and the reasons you’ve offered for rejecting Cartesian skepticism are fallacious.
For example, you’ve argued that Bad Things Will Happen if we accept Cartesian skepticism. For one thing, that’s a fallacious argument from consequences, since the correctness of Cartesian skepticism is independent of the consequences of accepting it. Second, the predicted Dire Consequences wouldn’t actually follow from its acceptance.
To deliberately reject the best-supported position on a philosophical question seems like antiphilosophy to me.
I’ve accepted that they are physical in the sense of being physical-1, which is a term I came up in order to make sense of your claims because you refused to define “physical” when asked. But I also made it clear that I am not going to use the word “physical” to mean “physical-1.” So no, I conceded nothing.
If semantic externalism is true, then the Cartesian picture of the mind fails, and Cartesian skepticism along with it.
KN,
You’re approaching it backwards. “Physical” doesn’t imply “physical-1”, but “physical-1” does imply “physical”.
You conceded the whole shebang when you acknowledged that everything is physical-1. You just didn’t realize it.
The logic is simple and easy to follow:
1) Everything is physical-1.
2) Everything that’s physical-1 is also physical.
3) Therefore everything is physical.
4) Therefore physicalism is true.