Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 24, 2017, 15:35 (2556 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I proposed that enlargement/shrinkage exists in all pre-homos. You agreed. Remember?

dhw: Yes, but that is not the issue. If temporary enlargement and shrinkage (through complexification) could not implement the new concept (e.g. making and learning to use a spear), the effort of implementation would have required new cells, and that would have caused expansion beyond the existing size. I don’t believe expansion took place for no reason and without a cause!

Remember, God did it!

dhw: Why would your God bother to expand pre-sapiens brains if there was no progress?

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DAVID: Each brain enlargement allowed progress beyond the last stage.

dhw: Progress comes in the form of new concepts. But they cannot be made real without brain changes, which happen with the effort to implement new concepts. Hence each brain enlargement RESULTED from the implementation of new concepts. The changes do not happen BEFORE the concept is even formed!

New concepts require more advanced thought from previous thoughts, which is provided by larger more complex brain which permits the appearance of more advanced thought..

dhw: So that’s settled! Slow progress until a few specially clever individuals caused the leap. Except that you still can’t bear the thought that this is a perfectly natural progression.[/i]

DAVID: Of course a perfectly natural progression with no permanent brain enlargement.

dhw: Yes, the brain had reached its optimum size. Thank you for accepting my solution to the “mystery” of the sudden leap.

All of us had bigger frontal lobes and more cortex. We could easily accommodate the new concepts.

dhw: You agree that sapiens brain and skull could not enlarge any further without serious physical problems. That is why sapiens complexification (with resultant shrinkage) took over from pre-sapiens enlargement.

DAVID: All pre-homos had a degree of complexification! This is why the progression of hominins had a 200cc increase with each new stage of evolutionary development.

dhw: The increase didn’t come about because pre-homos had a degree of complexification! It came about when complexification couldn’t cope, and the implementation of new concepts required expansion. THAT is why each new stage of evolutionary development was a progression from complexification to enlargement as new concepts became a reality.

Expressed in the other thread: based on what we know about brains, each stage of hominin brain started with a set size and degree of complexity and could expand and contract with developing thought within the same skull size until the next large jump in sized appeared through God's intervention.

DAVID: I'm sorry you cannot accept God at work. But your substitute theistic approach is also God at work.

dhw: I cannot accept your pointless inversion of the process whereby implementation of concepts causes brain change, as proven by modern science. But if God exists, then of course my alternative interpretation has him at work. He would have created the mechanism whereby the cell communities of all organisms adjust their structure in order to implement new concepts: the human body for bipedalism, the human brain to translate ideas into reality, the whale to move from land to water, the fish to move from water to land. Every change as a response to challenges and opportunities in a perfectly natural progression which explains the whole history of life on Earth in terms of the common descent you and I both believe in.

Your theory never explains a 200cc jump in size. Only God explains it.