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

by dhw, Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 13:32 (2703 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The brain, you keep telling us, is only a RECEIVER. And so according to your own beliefs, it is the independent conscious self that thinks of a spear and tells the brain to enlarge so that the body can make and use the spear. Where do you think ideas come from: your receiver brain or your conscious self? Do please answer.
DAVID: I don't know why you have understood my view. The brain is an active receiver of consciousness about which I have many times said that in a way the brain is a computer using consciousness as a software, an inexact analogy but it expresses my concept. I use my consciousness through my brain just as I direct my conputer at my keyboard.

Why bother with an inexact analogy? You believe you have a material receiver brain and an immaterial conscious self. So do you believe your ideas come from your material receiver brain or from your immaterial conscious self?

dhw: Malassé actually suggests that the changes may denote “conceptual and creative innovations well before homo habilis”, so you certainly can’t derive your assumption from her work.
DAVID: And who made those innovations?
dhw: The hominins!
DAVID: My comment is misunderstood. God made the bodily innovations. And how did the hominins make their innovations? Using a big brain they were given as a new species.

The hominins did indeed make their innovations by using their big brains. The question is whether the big brain engendered the concept of the spear, or the concept of the spear required and so engendered a bigger brain.

dhw: I have pointed out that even you can see no sense in your theory that God preprogrammed or dabbled all these different itsy-bitsy twiddles and all the hominins and all the pre-whales when all he really wanted to do was produce sapiens.
DAVID: It all makes perfect sense if you accept balance of nature as a necessary part of evolution.

Your "balance of nature" means life continues, regardless of what organisms survive, and of course evolution needs life to continue. You might just as well say life is a necessary part of evolution. Hardly a revelation.

DAVID: And if you accept that God uses evolutionary processes to make the universe, the Earth, and evolved life to the point that humans appear.

If God exists, of course I accept it. But that does not mean God specially designed the eight stages of the whale in order to keep life going until he could produce humans.

DAVID: But you don't want to accept God. If you accepted what I present as 'evidence' you would have to accept God. So be it. We'll continue the debate.

Irrelevant when our discussion is not over the existence of God but over his motives and methods. You constantly try to divert attention away from the self-confessed senselessness of your anthropocentric evolutionary hypothesis. (“If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense.”)