Dualism versus materialism (Identity)

by dhw, Monday, July 24, 2017, 13:37 (2678 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It is therefore as clear as daylight that a larger brain is NOT required for those ideas, but is only required for their implementation. Hence my proposal of ideas first, implementation and larger brain second, as in the illiterate women’s “idea” of reading first, implementation and rewiring second.

DAVID: The newly reading women used an already exiting larger brain to become literate. Size first use second.

As usual, you talk of “use”, but you have already acknowledged that “use” means gathering information or implementing ideas, and NOT coming up with new ideas, which you believe to be the product of the "soul" and not the brain. You are also once more ignoring the fact that the brain clearly reached its optimum size a few hundred thousand years ago, and densification appears to have replaced expansion as its means of IMPLEMENTING new ideas (shrinkage being an indication of the efficiency of densification). Ideas first, implementation and expansion/densification second.

DAVID: I presume end of discussion.
dhw: Except that you had dismissed my muscle analogy on the grounds that muscles already exist, and I pointed out that in your own examples legs, fins and brains already existed too. Just as muscles respond to exercise, I propose that legs, fins and brains respond to new uses under new conditions. Do you now accept the logic of that argument, even if you still adhere to your own theory?
DAVID: No. I'm discussing the size of brains, not the form change of limbs. Muscles respond immediately enlarging with training. Brain size jumps are gaps in the fossil record, just as leg to flipper changes are gaps in the fossil record. The gaps created by speciation do not explain how larger brains are used. Artifacts are evidence of that. Apples and oranges.

Artifacts are evidence that new ideas were implemented, and the implementation coincided with an increase in the size of the brain. As a dualist you believe that the new ideas came from the soul, not the brain. The obvious implication, then, is that it was the implementation that required the expansion, just as later in the history of the brain it was the implementation of the idea of reading that required and led to the rewiring (no “gap”, but a saltation).