Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 22, 2017, 13:37 (2558 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] Each successive group of pre-homos and homos had gaps of larger brain/skull size adding an average 200cc with each more advanced species. […] Also each larger brain is found with more advanced artifacts. It is an unavoidable conclusion that a larger brain allowed the development of more advanced artifacts. Timing cannot be inverted, as you do.

dhw: There is no inversion, but yes, "the larger brain allowed the development of more advanced artifacts" in the sense that it enabled the initial concept to be implemented. As you have acknowledged, the latest research proves that the brain changes to handle new activities, and so pre-sapiens brains must have expanded when rewiring couldn’t cope. First came the concept of more advanced artefacts, and then the brain expanded through effort to implement the concept -

DAVID: The fallacy in you thought is my point that the smaller brain does not have the ability to have the concept that causes expansion. Only the larger more complex brain can develop the concept.

As usual you are conflating two steps into one. We know for a fact that the brain changes when it tries to implement the concept. The concept must come before the effort to implement it. You have simply used the word “develop” instead of “implement”. In concrete terms: if the concept of learning to write CAUSED the brain to change in the course of implementation, it is illogical to assume that the brain had to change before habilis had the concept of making tools. (Though in fact it would have been immediate pre-habilis that had the concept, and that is why habilis developed a bigger brain.)

DAVID: Survival concepts are limited, and each hominin advance in artifacts show minimal thought advancement until the last 10,000 years of H. Sapiens. A 300,000 year-old sapiens brain had the capacity to develop those thoughts, but took 290,000 years to do it. Your theory is inverted.

See above for your own inversion of the theory. What point are you trying to make with regard to each hominin advance in brain size? Are you saying there was no reason for them to expand, and there was no progress made? From no tools to flints to spears, to use of fire, to who knows what social advancements – these would all explain the successive expansions as concept led to implementation. And once the new concept is made reality, it serves as the basis for more new concepts, and hence further expansion until the point is reached when further expansion becomes impractical.
You keep harping on about 300,000 years and 290,000 years. The exact figures are not known, but bigger-brained Neanderthals are believed to been around 200,000 years ago, and interbred with sapiens. They are now considered to have been very sophisticated, so how “minimal” is minimal advancement up to 10,000 years go? In due course, yes, there was a leap in thought development, but you can hardly claim that it was due to brain expansion if the brain had been the same size for 290,000 years! So please give us your theory as to why, according to you, sapiens didn’t use his brain capacity for 290,000 years.
Meanwhile, let me make a suggestion. Everything must have an origin, and all progress is made by individual discoveries. It only takes ONE human to transform the way of life of all humans by an act of invention. Then others may build on that act of invention, and develop it still further. I have no idea how much progress was made during the 290,000 years, but discoveries and inventions are what have transformed the human world. And the same applies to thought about the world. Someone asks: “How did we get here?” And then more and more people ask the same, and thought builds on thought. (In passing: whether those thoughts and inventions are engendered by the “soul” you believe in, or by the chemicals that materialists believe to be the source, makes no difference to the argument. The soul or the chemicals engender the thoughts that once led to expansion but now lead to complexification.) And so if there was a sudden leap forward 10,000 years ago, it could only have been because certain individual souls or certain individual brain cell communities came up with new ideas. The final response to your inversion of the theory comes next:

dhw: The large pre-frontal and frontal lobes mark the optimal size (you agree later: “it seems as if this current brain has reached an ideal level of development”). All our concepts from then on are implemented by rewiring/complexification.
DAVID: Exactly. All the concepts appear after the size enlargement. That is the history of our development. [...]

You seem to think concepts only began with sapiens. Of course all the concepts that appeared after the brain had stopped expanding appeared after the brain had stopped expanding! Instead of expanding the brain as in pre-sapiens time, they now make it rewire itself because it couldn't go on expanding indefinitely! The concept always precedes the implementation, and modern science has proved that the brain does not change until it starts to implement the concept. Why do you keep denying the findings you yourself have drawn our attention to?