Different in degree or kind: Sapiens begin brain use (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 12:39 (2951 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: According to you, your self is not your brain but your conscious soul, since that apparently will survive when your body dies. You now have your conscious soul controlling your brain and its functions, but one of your brain’s functions is to manage your conscious soul. Unless managing differs from controlling, this does not make sense to me.
DAVID: I control my brain, though which I use and control my consciousness/soul. My brain does not manage my c/s, I do through the instrument of my brain. I believe in free will which I view the same as 'control' or management. I am the pilot of my ship and all its parts.

Here, and in the comment that follows (which I shan’t repeat) you are separating your self (“I”) from your consciousness, which earlier you agreed you could not do. If your dualist's controlling “I” is not your conscious self/soul, what is it? Your dualist’s free will is also part of your conscious self and not of your brain. Earlier you said “my brain is material managing a non-material consciousness”. I’m glad you now agree that your brain does NOT manage your consciousness. If you believe in dualism, your conscious self is the pilot of your ship, and the brain is part of the ship. The ship does not “manage” the pilot.

dhw: This whole discussion began with your claim that your God created the larger brain, and then consciousness/the soul/the self learned how to use it – as opposed to the brain expanding in response to the demands of consciousness.
DAVID: I view it as size first, and with brain plasticity, new learned use second. Consciousness is an instrument which has to be learned to be used to full extent. Developed language greatly expands the use of conscious thought and the continuous buzz in one's head.

I agree that language expands the use of conscious thought, but would add that conscious thought greatly expands language, which initially is the result of the buzz, not the cause: hence the invention of new words. I would also say that consciousness is learning all the time, if by consciousness we mean that part of ourselves which processes information, takes decisions, accesses memories, learns from experiences, interprets, invents etc. And if I were a dualist, I would argue that the brain needed to expand in order to cope with the expansion of human awareness.

DAVID: Evolution only advances with the passage of less adequate and less complex species. Death makes room for the living. Nothing 'wrong' about evolution. It produced us.
Dhw: What do you mean by “passage”? As we both keep repeating, evolution advances perfectly well without the death of the least complex species (single-celled). “Less adequate” ones dying out merely confirms the Darwinian process of natural selection. It doesn’t explain why your God preprogrammes “inadequate” solutions in the first place.

DAVID: And I keep repeating David Raup: extinction are 'bad luck' from extreme environmental changes, not inadequate organisms. Adequate organisms live in adequate comfortable environments. The dinos weren't prepared for Chicxulub. Should God have prepared them? Your comment makes no sense.

I am happy with your acknowledgement that evolution is not meticulously planned by your God but actually depends to an enormous extent on luck. The apparently unplanned environmental changes have been accompanied by extinctions and/or innovations in a history I keep describing as higgledy-piggledy. This suggests to me that your God wanted higgledy-piggledy, and what better way than to leave organisms to work out (or fail to work out) their own ways of survival and improvement in the face of ever changing conditions? Meanwhile, all the complexities of dinosaurs, which according to you only your God could have planned, were wiped out by bad luck. That’s it: luck clearly plays a crucial role in the process of natural selection which determines survival and extinction. Lucky for us that chance didn’t send along a Chicxulub times 50, or all God’s meticulous plans would have been pulverized. A strange way for an almighty power to pursue his fixed “goal” (producing us humans) – but I suppose you will say that you can’t always understand your version of your God’s logic.