Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, November 27, 2017, 18:06 (2553 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: If I’ve understood this convoluted sentence correctly, it means the more cells there are, the more complex the activities. How does that prove that the brain expanded before homo thought of the concept that required expansion?

DAVID: More cortex, more consciousness mechanism received for the soul to use, and as this happens the brain can remake its connections and neurons to more efficiently use its consciousness, and stay the same size for that stage of hominin development.

dhw: I thought the soul WAS the consciousness mechanism in your dualistic world. The soul/consciousness mechanism uses the cortex, and the cortex remakes its connections and neurons in order to implement the demands made by the soul. It stays the same size until it can’t cope with the new demands, and then it adds more cells and expands accordingly.

My position stated well, but as the cortex remakes its connections it shrinks as in sapiens. See post of 5 minutes ago.

DAVID: You keep ignoring my concept of the brain as a receiver of a consciousness mechanism! Bigger brain receives a larger more complex consciousness.

dhw: You keep ignoring it yourself, whenever you talk of the brain’s capacity to think! According to you, the soul thinks and the brain receives. The more the soul thinks, the more the brain has to expand to “receive” it. The thought precedes the reception, which precedes the expansion!

The soul uses the brain to think as the receiver of consciousness. Again conceive of it as computer and software.

dhw: [..] he may have designed the mechanism enabling organisms to make the changes.
DAVID: And He will be sure His purposes are carried out. Don't you think He has purposes and goals?

dhw: If he exists, of course he does. Yet again: I suggest his purpose is to provide an ever changing spectacle, which you call “God lite” and “humanizing”, and you suggest his purpose (in designing billions of species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extant) was to produce humans so they would think about him, have a relationship with him, solve the problems he set them, and watch them with interest. Presumably that’s called God heavy and not “humanizing”.

I think it is what His personality might encompass.