Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Neither Dualism Nor Hard Determinism

I would label my worldview as "Christian materialism/physicalism." That may not be saying much since so-called Christian materialists can be found in various groups and churches/religions. What I mean by Christian materialism (aka physicalism) is that I believe Jehovah God exists and he is the only true God/Most High over all the earth, I affirm the existence of angels/spirit beings created by God (Hebrews 1:7, 14), but I reject the existence of an immaterial soul that is truly distinct from the physical body (Genesis 2:7; Ezekiel 18:4). The human soul is the person and it's composed of the human body and our life force. However, these beliefs are informed by Judeo-Christianity or the Bible (both Tanakh and the NT). One upshot of this worldview is that I reject dualism and hard determinism. To word matters simply, hard determinism rules out what I would consider a meaningful type of free will or free choice. 

Based on my worldview, I reject the following argument:
Either dualism (p) or hard determinism (q) is true; hard determinism is false, therefore, dualism is true.
But I do not accept the conclusion that results from denying p either, that is, I do not believe that hard determinism is true. My position is that humans are one thing, physical, yet we also have a meaningful type of free will/free choice (Joshua 24:15). I humbly submit this position and do not mean to take a dogmatic stance merely based on opinion.

Just to clarify, dualism comes in many forms, but here's a basic definition given by SEP: "In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical – or mind and body or mind and brain – are, in some sense, radically different kinds of things."

Determinism means that the past and the laws of nature fix the future. That is putatively why we can expect the sun to rise each day, to have seasons, weather patterns and trust in gravity. 

Oxford Languages' Definition for Determinism: "the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions."

We must concede that there are various species of determinism which run along a continuum from hard to soft determinism. Moreover, there is biological, theological, causal, and logical determinism among others, but strict determinism rules out free will altogether. Some argue that genes determine our behavior whereas others emphasize cultural influence as a behavioral determinant while John Calvin believed that God determines all things. Compare Proverbs 16:33.  

There are variant degrees of determinism and ways of understanding just how the future is fixed. For instance, is the future fixed by means of one's environment, genetics or past actions, and what exact role do the laws of nature have in fixing the future? Contrariwise, I accept that the future is open in some sense of the word and I affirm that humans have freedom in a meaningful way although saying we have "libertarian freedom" might be going too far. It all depends on what someone means by libertarian freedom. Reading the Bible, it seems to affirm human free will, but simultaneously indicates that Jehovah has the power to direct hearts (Proverbs 21:1). I'm not trying to pave new ground here, just trying to illustrate how one can reject dualism (humans have an immaterial soul and a material body) while still gainsaying hard determinism. 

85 comments:

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

It seems to me that Christian physicalism is the only way that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement can be assigned any coherence.

Leviticus ch.17:11NIV"For the life (nefesh/psyche) of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life (nefesh/psyche). c

Duncan said...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fleck/

Edgar Foster said...

That's an interesting connection that I need to ponder. Not that I disagree but I never thought about it being the only way that the substitutionary atonement works. Hebrews 9:22 might be applicable here too.

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, maybe you can shed light on how the link from SEP applies to dualism or determinism or not, but there's things in the article to which I assent but other statements that I find problematic or downright inaccurate.

Duncan said...

As we have discussed before. If a child is not taught to speak by about age 12 then they never will. If someone is blind from birth one cannot describe colour to them in a meaningful way. We are a succession of knowledge and a group think. Is this not relevant?

I would appreciate an example of what you think is an inaccuracy? I would like to look at it please.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

If the spiritualists are right blood would not be essential to the soul's existence. And thus the blood of Christ would have no redeeming value.

Hebrews ch.2:13ESV"Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, "
Hebrews ch.2:16ESV"For surely it is not angels(Spirit creatures) that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. "
An offering of blood and flesh cannot redeem a spirit being.

Edgar Foster said...

Servant: thanks for clarifying. Yes, I agree that spiritualists/dualists don't usually believe that the soul needs blood to exist. They're quite explicit in affirming the disembodied state of the soul after death.

Duncan: Here's one issue I have with Fleck. Are we to believe that "What we call 'facts', are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature."

How can facts be reduced to a type of social consensus? While I believe in social/institutional facts, I do not think that all facts are nothing but social constructs.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

"Facts are stubborn things..." John Adams

Duncan said...

One summation - "Micro sociologists argue that many of the concepts and institutions that exist in society and that are often treated as social facts are, in reality, social constructs: they have been created by people in society through shared interpretations and assumptions." - Seems reasonable to me, that many, even the majority work this way but not necessarily all.

I suppose that the social constructs are a way of packaging facts that are not easy to grasp or frame?

I understand the term dualism, in terms of spirit and soul, as some put forward but we are a summation. If a spirit body does not have the same attributes of a physical body then how can the person (personality) still be thew same person (personality)?

Duncan said...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8CsdfSH_X3wC&pg=PA299&lpg=PA299&dq=%22only+what+is+true+to+culture+is+true+to+nature%22&source=bl&ots=c5qXXcBxou&sig=ACfU3U0evEKOIDd1594DIo0NmMXnqCbT7A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiO-pP92Ob_AhWAQkEAHVA1BLIQ6AF6BAgyEAM#v=onepage&q=%22only%20what%20is%20true%20to%20culture%20is%20true%20to%20nature%22&f=false

Edgar Foster said...

Yes indeed, servant, facts are stubborn things.

Duncan, I'm just saying that all facts cannot be social constructs since many things were factual/facts before people or societies ever existed. And the speed of light in a vacuum is a fact regardless of what societies or people say. Many other examples if non-social facts could be adduced.

How one defines a person is a controversial matter and there is no single agreed upon definition.

I like the criteria for personhood that Nancey Murphy delineates. Moreover, what about Jesus? Is he the same person now that he was before his resurrection occurred?

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

We need not single out Jesus. That question could be asked any living creature. Lifeforms can be likened to vortices ,our forms are maintained by a constant stream of energy and matter flowing through us. Thus none of us are reducible to the matter and energy currently passing through the borders that define us.

Edgar Foster said...

Servant, I agree that other examples could be employed, no doubt. I picked Jesus because he was the first to have the experience of becoming a life-giving spirit and he opened the way for others to have spiritual bodies which do not have all the attributes of their (former) physical bodies. Moreover, if someone has a problem with Jesus' now having a different body than he had on earth, I wonder how he/she accepts the resurrection of Christ. But I cede your remark that we can look elsewhere to make the same point.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

The point I was trying to make though is that the body we have now is not the same as the body we had even a year ago, certainly it is not the body we had when we were infants,yet we are conscious of being the same person. So we already accept the principle of a single self expressing itself through a succession of bodies with varying properties.
Of course the scale of the change from a physical to a nonphysical form would be orders of magnitude greater than any we would experience during the cours of our lives but it's not inconceivable once we have accepted a non reductive physicalism.

Duncan said...

https://biblehub.com/text/hebrews/1-12.htm

https://biblehub.com/greek/allage_sometha_236.htm

https://biblehub.com/text/john/6-63.htm

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0010414012466377?journalCode=cpsa

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/science-as-a-product-of-culture/4014432.article

Edgar Foster said...

I concur with you, servant. Some challenge the notion that we remain stable selves, but I believe we remain the same person over time. You've probably seen the thought experiment known as Theseus' ship. Nevertheless, that just works against certain theories of identity.

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, I will check out your links. Please also see Hebrews 13:8

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, to Hebrews 1:12, I say amen. Recall that we discussed 1 Corinthians 15 not that long ago. The context is about the heavenly resurrection and Paul says some will go from being mortal to being immortal, from being corruptible to being incorruptible. I also posted a select bibliography about this subject

Edgar Foster said...

Regarding John 6:63, which spirit and which flesh? What does he mean?

Anonymous said...

This is what Hebrews says.

Anonymous said...

Just read Hebrews 13:9, it is talking about teachings that do not change. Not the same thing.

Anonymous said...

Again, about teaching.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

It seems a better approach to identity might be to think of the mind as a program and the living body as some kind of information processing system. For instance the movie that was originally recorded in analog remains same movie even after being converted to digital. It's a crude comparison of course but
It seems more descriptive of the the bible's version of physicalism.

Edgar Foster said...

Hebrews 13:8 is a compressed statement that might be connected to 13:9, but I'm not sure it tells us nothing about the person of Christ.

Servant, all analogies have their limits and some thinkers have proposed similar models to explain mind. I have suggested the analogy of a computer file that can be transferred, put on disk, etc. I like your movie example too.

Duncan said...

Even the language of the bible regarding Yehovah has much as much to say about us. Arm, hand, eyes, face etc. Remove all this and we are still the same?

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

And apart from the limits of speech and text there is also the issue of our cognitive limits. Can the mind ever fully understand itself?

Roman said...

I think what this is going to lead to, is some redefinition of "physical" or "material" ... i.e. Pre-Galileo metaphysics.

Ultimately I think what this is going to lead to is some kind of idealism (i.e. the material world has features normally attributed to mind).

I wonder what you mean by "truly" distinct.

Also the Bible, as far as I can tell, does not say that the mind, or even the "life" is of the same metaphysical nature as the physical body, of course the term "soul" just refers to the living person, but it doesn't tell us the metaphysical nature of said person.

I reject the argument also.

I would put it this way.

If one takes materialism/physicalism to say that what exists (other than heavenly beings) is that which science describes, then not only is determinism true but ALL kinds of problems follow ... (there are no essences, therefore no ipseity, etc etc, you either end up with Wittgensteinian scepticism or Kantian scepticism), one other option is dualism (with all of its problems, the other option is to say to say that ... as Hegel puts it ... "The real is the rational and the rational is the real."

Such that physical descriptions of the world are abstractions, just as much as artistic descriptions, but the world IS a world of rationally ordered relations and teleological ends, and so on. So in that world the mind, and the reasons/will of agential action are not impositions on a fundamental reality of mindless matter, but that mind is fundamental, and the world is not "mindless" but is infact transcendentially ordered from and to God,

I honestly think that some kind of mixture of insights from neo-platonism and german idealism are going to be necessary for any kind of coherent metaphysics.

If the human person just IS the body, there are serious problems with the ressurection, ipseity, etc etc. The analogies of a computer and software don't work, computers are not like human minds at all, they don't think, they have no rationality desire, or anything, any more than books are literate or calculators "calculate." That something I see on your screen and my screen is the "same" is entirely dependent on the interpretive work of human minds, which are NOT anything like computers.

I also highly recommend this book by Stepehen RL Clark

https://angelicopress.org/god-religion-reality-clark

Edgar Foster said...

Servant, no. I don't believe the mind can ever fully understand itself. Like the bible says about the heart, who can know it?

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, the anthropomorphisms are mainly for our benefit like making things simple for a child. Theology is more than loud talk about humanity.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

No one is claiming that the mind is a computer program. But merely that their are similarities I.e mind is abstract and cannot exist apart from a functional brain of some kind and of course there is no comparing of human technology with supreme technology of JEHOVAH.

Edgar Foster said...

Roman, thanks for the book recommendation and I really appreciate your comments. I won't go into a thorough reply now, and it might take me time to read your remarks thoughtfully, then offer some feedback. But for now, when I said I reject the idea of an immaterial soul that is truly distinct from the physical body, I had in mind the common belief in Christendom that the soul is not physical/material and it's different in some way from the body. Descartes famously posited substance dualism, but there are other kinds of dualistic theories like hylomorphic dualism, which allow for the soul to exist apart from the body even if it's not complete without the body. John Searle has a diagram in his book, Mind, where he illustrates how people tend to view the soul over against how they look at the body. For instance, the body is spatial but the soul is not.

At the end of the day, I'm trying to avoid strict physicalism (reductive physicalism), dualism, and hard determinism. As you know, a lot of these aforementioned theories have been tried in the past and retried. My experience has been that all human theories lead to a dead end at some point: Saul Kripke and Peter van Inwagen have made comments to this effect with which I largely agree though I'm no friend of skepticism.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

Science does not know what matter is, So physicalism is not giving a blank check to scientists.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

99.99+% of the atom is empty space and that empty space is integral to the properties of the element in question the subatomic particles that make up the rest of the atom are wraiths. And of course physical matter is not eternal or self existent.
Matter itself is not reducible to matter.

Duncan said...

This discussion demonstrates how science is culture. Framing each problem with something we already think we know or understand. As someone who has a good grounding in software design and formulating algorithms, I can assure you that so called AI computer systems are nothing of the sort. As a Generative Pre-trained Transformer it has pre-programmed rules for data sifting that include weighting. I have put many of these tools to the test and they definitely do not learn in any meaningful way.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833070-100-why-the-vast-emptiness-of-space-isnt-really-that-empty-after-all/

The human body is completely dependent on bacteria without which we could not function & thinking can be altered by the balance of the gut brain axis.

The ship analogy does not work either as this is regarding the functionality of simple mechanics. You can have on ship built based on the other and they both function identically. No need to replace the parts, just build another - cookie cutter style.

Frankly, anyone who thinks that thinking can be separated from the body has no leg to stand-on (unintended pun). I cannot interact with what Jesus must or must not be or how he was resurrected - that is all speculative and framed by our developed culture over time.

Duncan said...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5641835/

Duncan said...

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/anxiety-might-be-alleviated-by-regulating-gut-bacteria/

Duncan said...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01479-w

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, what about scientific discoveries that have nothing to do with culture? For instance, the discovery of atoms, subatomic particles, and hydrogen fusion? All those things exist independently of culture like matter does.

I didn't really ask about the mechanics of Jesus' resurrection. My question involved things that scripture states like he was raised from the dead and now has a glorified body. How is that speculative?

My main point was that it's ludicrous for a Christian not to believe Jesus is not the same person that he was 2,000 years ago. Paul writes that if Jesus Christ was not raised from death back to life, it's futile to be a Christian. And we're all in a quandary if Christ was not raised from the dead.

Edgar Foster said...

The ship analogy is a famous Gedanken. It's designed to show the problemata associated with identity over time. It's not a personal view that I hold.

Duncan said...

Jesus was raised from the dead, but then he was "transfigured" (whatever that actually means) but Paul never saw it happen, his experience was "in vision".

Edgar Foster said...

Paul's account in 1 Corinthians and Acts must be read carefully. Where does the bible teach that Christ was transfigured postmortem? I've never read that exact language. Regarding Paul, he wrote that the Lord appeared to the apostles, upwards of 500 men and he appeared to him. Doesn't sound like a vision to me. At least, not like Daniel's visions or the visions of Zephaniah. Besides, the resurrection of Christ is a Christian doctrine. One cannot against it and still be a Christian. And that means accepting that Christ has a glorified body now.

Duncan said...

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/03/06/commentary-the-looming-crisis-for-us-tritium-production/

Hydrogen fusion is a marketing myth for any meaningful scale. It is a byproduct of other nuclear material where the embodiment of energy to mine and produce outweighs the energy output. It a leaky capacitor.

The real drive to discover a practical use of the atom was as a deterrent/weapon of war. Its existence had been speculated about for centuries. Most technical advances have war as there driver and backdrop. They all add to the heat engine that is civilization.

Duncan said...

"Paul, he wrote that the Lord appeared to the apostles, upwards of 500 men and he appeared to him" -And Jesus said ??????

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

One thing you need to remember when you read these scientific papers is that these are guesses, maybe better informed guesses than the average person but guesses nonetheless

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan,

1) Atoms are real or fusion in the sun occurs whether scientists or humans exist. Neither can be reduced to a social construct.

2) Paul started to follow Christ after the Lord was resurrected, but Jesus speaks in Acts too. Paul also said he was made an apostle by God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Duncan said...

"Paul also said he was made an apostle by God the Father and Jesus Christ."

The science that is pursued can be reduced to a social construct.

The scientific papers I have posted are generally correct as the hypothesis can be tested and is repeatable. Broad spectrum antibiotics have created many new long term chronic illnesses.

Anonymous said...

not to change the subject Edgar but check this out:
https://brill.com/view/journals/hbth/44/2/article-p141_2.xml?ebody=full%20html-copy1

Edgar Foster said...

Thanks anonymous. That is a good article. I posted about it elsewhere on the blog and we recently discussed the article in one of my entries on Merkel's book.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

"the hypothesis has been tested and is repeatable therefore correct." The same was true of any number of hypotheses now of favour Duncan.

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, please see https://www.britannica.com/science/statistics/Hypothesis-testing

One limitation with induction/a posteriori methods is that it yields probable knowledge unlike deduction which yields certain knowledge, depending on the premises.

Duncan said...

Unlike atoms or viruses, bacteria can be more easy ly seen an studies so you can throw as much technical jargon at me as you like but the practicalities mean the it is not an even playing field. I only see those types of comments as introduction of doubt, which is valid but the levels of doubt are not the same.

Duncan said...

Humans never really seemed interested in bacteria apart from find new and inventive ways of killing them, something that COVID vaccines have also been found to be good at. Very few have been interested in getting them into balance and it's really no difference to mono crops and pesticides, that just produce super weeds and eventually desert. It's only at this point of mass destruction that anyone is paying attention. There has been an explosion. Search pubmed for gutbrain to see what I mean. But is more than that minerals or lack thereof also affect brain function and thinking ability. Its recognised in a humble sheep but ignored in humans.

Duncan said...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77673-z

Duncan said...

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149/rr-20

Duncan said...

https://www.severnedgevets.co.uk/blog/downer-ewes

Duncan said...

The next phase of research - https://www.science.org/content/article/do-gut-bacteria-make-second-home-our-brains

Duncan said...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00260-3

https://youtu.be/HUti6vGctQM

Duncan said...

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-01-23-gut-bacteria-linked-personality

Edgar Foster said...

Duncan, I did approve the last replied you posted, but please remember that this is a theological blog. Tangential conversations are allowed to some extent, but the focus should primarily be theological/religious and this particular thread was about dualism and hard determinism. If there's nothing left to say on that topic, I can close the thread.

Edgar Foster said...

One of the main points i was trying to make about Fleck is that everything is not a social construct: the sun is a certain temperature, no matter what I or my community thinks and it exists whether any humans exist. Also, DNA is not a social construct. It existed before being discovered.

Duncan said...

The mind is physical and there is no evidence to the contrary.

Duncan said...

Fleck was speaking of Medical knowledge - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11435448#:~:text=Scientific%20facts%20are%20socially%20constructed,the%20different%20thought%20collectives%20difficult.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

The physical is necessary but is not sufficient for the human/animal mind to exist and flourish, according to scripture.
Numbers ch.27:16KJV"Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,"

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

Here is one dictionary's definition of mind: the totality of conscious and unconscious mental processes and activities.:
So defined this way mind is certainly not physical but an abstraction that describes the outcome of a process which necessarily involves some physical elements.

Duncan said...

Come on now servant,quoting the KJV for your purposes? ;) You are normally a fan boy of the NIV which says - 16 “May the Lord, the God who gives breath to all living things, appoint someone over this community 17 to go out and come in before them, one who will lead them out and bring them in, so the Lord’s people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.”

We are told from the start that Yehovah breathed the breath of life into man but you are trying to push it into saying something that it is not.

Duncan said...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-0711-8

This is why a computer will never mimic a brain. You need a brain to mimic a brain. Electro chemical, bacterial. The complexity of physical elements is beyond description.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1884&printable=1

Your dictionary is trying to define that which has not been defined. They are making stuff up.

Duncan said...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8146510/

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

Air can't animate a lifeless body Duncan,everybody knows that it is what the air fuels that animates the mind and soul. We know that there can be body without soul and that there can be soul without mind. The mind is not reducible to soul and the soul is not reducible to the body. The body is necessary but not sufficient for the Soul and the soul is necessary but not sufficient for the mind.
And I really don't know why you keep keep going on about computers nobody suggested that the mind is a computer. The point was simply being made that Just as a computer's function was not reducible to its hardware ,similarly the mind was not reducible to the brain.
Physicalism need not imply reductionism.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

I'm sorry Duncan you don't just get to change the dictionary. That is a big part of why the world is in the chaos that it is right now.
If the spirit is reducible to the air in the creature's nostrils then by your logic the unborn must have no spirit.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

And what about fish Duncan,no nostrils ,no air and by your logic no spirit.

Duncan said...

There's that useless computer analogy again,drop it.

You are being unreasonable. You can even see a fish breathing underwater something called H2O.

A babies air comes from it mother but when it is born it does it for itself. It recognises it mother's voice in the womb. But is that firmware?

Do you understand catalysts and volatile elements?

Who is changing what dictionary, yours?

You can say evil spirit, I can say Ill wind.

Life is a chain, but mind is not. If sensory input is insufficient a baby will die, if insufficient social input a baby will not learn to speak. This has all been demonstrated. Mind is social, whatever it is.

Duncan said...

https://eipmh.com/they-could-not-live-without-the-love/

As it points out, "love" = physical input.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

h20 is not "ruach" or "pneuma"
Duncan the baby gets no air from its mother the baby begins breathing after birth. An analogy is not an equivalence Duncan so saying that the mind can be likened to to a program run by hardware is not to make the mind equivalent to a computer shushing is not argument. I thought nobody knew what the mind was Duncan? And you continue to give further evidence that you are paying NO attention to my actual claims. Both life and mind are the result of processes that include necessary physical elements. I never said they were equivalent to the processes that bring them about.

Duncan said...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115289/

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

Mark ch.4:30,31ESV"And he said, Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it? 31It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth:"
So Duncan how soon can we expect to read your rant as to why JEHOVAH'S Kingdom is in no respect like a mustard seed or the fact that there are seeds that are smaller than the mustard seed, can we finally expect some consistency Duncan.

Duncan said...

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002395.htm#:~:text=The%20mother's%20placenta%20helps%20the,flows%20through%20the%20baby's%20body.

A chest does not need to rise and fall to breath.

You claim that the mind is not the hardware that there is some kind of divide, then prove it?????? You will be the first person in history to do it. Your are thinking hardware and firmware regardless of how you angle it. Even as an analogy it does not work as awareness in the womb develops as the brain grows. You do know about the bacterial inoculation that occurs as a baby passes through the birth canal, right?

Mark ch.4:30,31 is out their at a tangent, not even sure what you are talking about. What has the growth of the Kingdom got to do with all this?

Duncan said...

Servant, Edgar has seen this before but you might want to contemplate it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59YN8_lg6-U

Duncan said...

And here is a new one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9y4EFe7XtM

Duncan said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huH8zu4e1AU

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

I NEVER said that there was an actual divide I said the mind was not reducible to the brain just as sight is not reducible to the eyes.We know
Indisputably that there can be a brain without a mind.therefore the brain while necessary for the function of thinking is not sufficient for the function of thinking. You claimed that the air in the man's nostrils is the spirit of life. There is no air in the baby's lungs until it leaves the womb.breath is not strictly necessary for life, oxygen in the blood stream is necessary though not sufficient ,breathing air is a means to that end but there are are other possible means. Breathing is a means to an end not the end itself. Like all words ruach has multiple meanings basically ruach refers to any invisible current whether literal or figurative that causes/enables change or movement. The life force that animates the living things is fuel by oxygen(for the most part)usually extracted by breathing air among amphibious and terrestrial animals. But by other means among the unborn and aquatic lifeforms. Thus the current of air carrying the oxygen into lungs of the lifeform would be ruach the invisible life force fuel by the oxygen would also be ruach, even the mental dispositions that motivates ones life course would be ruach.




aservantofJEHOVAH said...

Duncan I sincerely hope that you don't consider these to be any kind of rebuttal to anything that I said because
Such a conclusion would just be further evidence that you are not engaging thoughtfully with my position. Physicalism does not equal reductionism that is my position. There are no dualists here.

Duncan said...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

https://www.princeton.edu/~hhalvors/teaching/phi520_f2012/hellman1975.pdf

My position is wholism which is similar to Holism, but thinking/mind in humans is an extension of the human as a whole being and is relative to the individuals sensory limitations.

And I maintain that to be transfigured into a form that is non human is to alter the future thinking along with the form. Like the lady in the last video, she can remember how things looked as opposed to someone who cannot remember because they have never seen.

That is also why the mind and body idea does not work for me the mind is integral to the body. To give sight to the blind is to alter the thinking to some extents as with any other physical change. Bacteria are integral to the human makeup and condition, so the colonies we nurture affect our thinking.

What we eat may be just as important - https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-health-benefits-of-apples.

This does not mention an important aspect of the vitamin C in a apple, that it is over 240 times more effective than vitamin C in a supplement & it is thought that there are unrecognized catalysts in the fruit the synergies the effect.

So maybe we are not so much in disagreement?

Edgar Foster said...

I will allow a few more replies in this thread before I lock it. I'm going to bed, but will check in the morning and lock accordingly. Thanks.

aservantofJEHOVAH said...

I would say their can be a body without a mind but there can be no mind without a body.

Edgar Foster said...

Comments are now being locked on this subject. For the record, I'd like to post this:

NIH: "To breathe outside the womb, a newborn's lungs must adapt immediately after birth. In the womb, the lungs of a fetus are filled with fluid."

So babies technically don't breathe in the womb per numerous sources.