Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 14:30 (2552 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

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

We don’t know if it actually shrank in pre-sapiens, but it makes no difference to the argument that expansion occurred when the existing brain couldn’t cope with new demands. Thank you for at long last accepting MY position. Having accepted it, I don’t know why you keep repeating the objections below.

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!

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

If the brain is the receiver of the soul’s thoughts, it is the soul that does the thinking and the brain that does the receiving. The computer (brain) obeys the instructions of the software (soul). And in pre-sapiens times the brain had to expand in order to implement the instructions of the soul, whereas now it complexifies. What are you objecting to?

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”.
DAVID: I think it is what His personality might encompass.

But although you think his personality might encompass watching us with interest and testing us and wanting a relationship with us, you don’t think it might encompass watching us and the rest of evolution with interest.