From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Sat Aug 16 2003 - 04:13:38 EDT
Blake Nelson wrote in part:
"...If you remember those
experiences, then they are almost certainly mediated
by a physical medium -- your brain."
Guess it depends on what one means by mediated. During the experiences the body, including the brain, obviously still functions as a physical body. It's just enhanced in some sense. So one could say the whole body mediates the experience, but I think that would be to miss what is distinctive about the interaction.
Does God as spirit have a memory? We'd all say yes. So his memory presumably does not require a physical register. It seems to follow then that I as a spiritual person may also have a spiritual memory that gets transcribed at some point (perhaps simultaneously) onto my physical memory, and that the experience of God itself remains unmediated by anything physical.
This is getting far adrift from science, but I have trouble with that "mediated" word in this context. To me spiritual interaction kind of implies lack of physical mediation, unless by mediation you just mean the human, who is physical, acts something like a substrate.
Maybe, if you spelled out how non-physical interaction would work in a "total dualism," what you mean by mediation would become clear.
Don
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