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

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 15:31 (2738 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 15:53

dhw: 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.

I must not have been clear in the past. This is how I view it.

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.

dhw: 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.

I agree that our present frontal lobe required brain pan expansion. Bone is very hard, brain is Jello. Enlargement first, brain complexity through plasticity later.

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.

dhw: 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.

And it is reasonable to assume God sized Chicxulub perfectly as part of the plan. Schroeder makes that assertion. Organisms do have epigenetic adaptive abilities. God makes it all work properly to reach the evolution of current humans.

This previous post explains how God might do it:

The real IM?; horizontal gene transfer (Introduction)
by David Turell , Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 19:06