Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

“A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways”

    Post 21. March 09, 2018

   The Whole Soul

    A Self divided against itself

    On the Thoughts Explained Blog*, “The Moral Skeptic” discusses a split-brain experiment that seemed to show that the human neural system can generate two separate minds. Thus, proving that there is no unique Soul existing apart from brain functions. That empirical evidence would indeed cast doubt on traditional notions of a spiritual Soul. But it demonstrates what you would expect if the Enformationism concept of the emergent "Self" is correct : the Mind is merely an operational function of brain processes, a behavior, not a thing. As an essential part of the mind’s operations, the Self is an imaginary symbol, like an Avatar, to represent the system in its inter-actions with the outside world.

This 21st century update of the Soul concept, will not sit well with hard-core Spiritualists, but it should suffice for BothAnd truth-seekers who label themselves as Spiritual-but-not-religious. The symbolic Self is not the kind of “person” who could go on to live forever in a literal heaven, or burn in Hell eternally. Instead, it serves its purpose while the body/brain system is alive and kicking. What happens to the Self after death is unknown, but subject to much speculation and mystery-mongering. It may just disappear like the image on your computer screen when the central processing unit crashes. But, since the Self/Soul consists of organized patterns of information, it could hypothetically be re-organized, if the system is re-booted (resurrected). That would be similar to the Star Trek Transporter deconstructing (by unspecified methods) a person's unique information structure on the Enterprise, and then beaming that information down to a planet, where it is reconstructed into a facsimile of the original person.  

However, as several thinkers have pondered the personal significance of such a death & resurrection, I'm not very sanguine about the feasibility of a material machine to pull it off. Yet the omnipotent deity that originally designed the universe to produce such abstractions as Life, Mind, and Self, could conceivably do anything it wanted. But I have no idea what G*D wants, so I'm not counting on being turned back on after my physical system has become non-functional. What do you think? Post your thoughts on the Forum. 

*Excerpt from The Moral Skeptic blog   http://themoralskeptic.blogspot.com/search/label/Consciousness

<< The example is given where an experimenter shows the word "walk" to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see and the person will comply and begin to walk. Admittedly not that interesting yet, but a strange thing happens when the person is asked why he got up and started walking (language is in the persons left hemisphere). The person doesn't say that, "I just got a feeling to" or that "Since my surgery where my corpus callosum was cut I do things without knowing exactly why."

Instead they say, in complete sincerity, that they were going to get a coke. They manufacture a logical reason for what they were doing, where it can be objectively shown that the reason was different.

That's the trickery coming in and Pinker concludes that, "The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of he inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind - the self or soul -is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief." >>

End of Post 21

Split-brain :
Neurosurgeons in the past would attempt to fix epilepsy by cutting the connections between left & right hemi-spheres of the brain. Each half continues to function normally, except it no longer shares information with its twin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

Avatar :
An image created to personify an abstraction. The ancient Hindu avatar, such as Krishna, was supposed to be the mortal embodiment of an immortal god. Similarly, the Self is an imaginary concept symbolizing the perspective of the mind/body system. See “Persona” in dictionary.

Star Trek Transporter :
A machine to dematerialize a physical object into its mathematical data patterns, and then to reconstitute the original physical form in a different location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek)

Spin-Doctor :
In the Hive Mind theory there is no dominant character, or commander, running the system. Instead the system is “self-organizing’. Lower-level systems produce logical narratives from incoming data, and send them to other systems for interpretation and action. There is no deliberate deception, as the term may suggest, but the inter-pretation will be made to fit with prior beliefs.

Musings on Self :
   In effect, the brain displays its thoughts & feelings to itself in a feedback loop. This creates something like a “virtual machine” inside the actual machine, but com-posed of only software, and no hardware*. The term “Virtual” in physics is analogous to “Spiritual” in meta-physics.
   The “virtual brain” then becomes the observer of the wet-ware brain’s information flows. That immaterial knowing & feeling observer has been called “Mind”, “Homunculus”, “Avatar”, “Soul”, “Spirit”, “Chi”, “Self”, “Ego”, “SuperEgo”, and so forth. I prefer Self due to its lighter load of mystical baggage.
   Exactly how & why the virtual brain becomes con-scious and self-aware is called the “hard problem” of philosophy and neuro-science. I’m guessing that the essential substance of our reality, Information, is omnipotential, hence can become both matter and mind.

 * virtual machine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine