Evolution and humans: big brain size or use (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 20:15 (2704 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The living brain/me/consciousness is seamless in life, but after death is a total different issue. Only me/consciousness exists in that circumstance. Why do you try to assume life and death are the same circumstance for the brain? In life material brain, immaterial me/consciousness; in death immaterial me/consciousness.

dhw: Of course life and death are not the same circumstance for the brain! The brain is no longer there after death! But you believe that the immaterial you will continue to exist after the death of the brain, with the same capacity to think, the same memories, the same ideas. This is why it is a total contradiction for you to argue that in life the immaterial "you" cannot think or conceptualize without the brain, which you yourself keep telling us is only a RECEIVER.

Your concept of brain as a receiver is that it is a passive receiver. I've never said nor implied that. Yes the brain receives the consciousness which it ACTIVELY uses under my direction to create all the attributes of my personality. All of what is created is immaterial, and leaves my body in death to join the afterlife all of which is immaterial. Events in the afterlife have been described, mainly as receiving information. Whether 'souls' discuss ideas, have conversations, etc. is unknown to me.

DAVID: An other mixed conflation. The women already had a large complex brain. The plasticity of the brain allowed them to modify it with learning to read. With enough new uses by humans the brain shrinks, not grows!

dhw: Yes, they already had a large brain. I am suggesting that at some time in the past the brain reached a size beyond which it could not grow without serious consequences for the rest of the anatomy, and so later modifications took place through rewiring and densifying, as with the illiterate women. Shrinkage, I suggest, is the result of efficient densification.

Your statement is true but avoids my comment about your internal drive theory that the wish for more concepts grows the brain. Habilis did not know what it did not know. These woman could learn to read because the brain they were given had a built in capacity to learn to read. All they had to do was use it. You cannot deny that. I'm sure habilis could not read.