Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 20:28 (2551 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Again you leave out the contraction caused by complexification. Skull size never changes until the next iteration of hominin arrives!

dhw: As above, it would have complexified (and contracted, if you insist) until it could no longer cope with new demands, and then it expanded – as opposed to your previous claim that it expanded BEFORE the new demands. Of course it doesn't change until it changes! And then we have our new hominin.

The reason I brought up indigenous folks is they that despite their having a huge brain, they choose not to use it. If they received it because of your nebulous demands, why did they get it? Even the hobbits had fairly large brains for their body size and are considered homos but lived in caves and were quite primitive. Only the complexity of a brain which can receive a complex consciousness can conceive of future needs.

dhw: The soul (if it exists) does the thinking and uses the brain to implement its thought. (The Indian women want to write, and the brain changes as they learn to implement the concept of writing.) I have explained the shrinkage umpteen times, and am perfectly happy to accept that the whole system was passed down to us, though I don’t understand “so skull size remained unchanged”. It would have remained unchanged until the existing capacity could no longer cope, and then it expanded.

Each time by 200cc! Only God could do that.

dhw: But it reached a stage with sapiens at which brain and skull could not expand any further. None of this alters the fact that changes to the brain, whether by expansion or by complexification, with or without pre-sapiens shrinkage, are the RESULT of the effort to implement new concepts and do not take place BEFORE those concepts exist. You have agreed above that this is so, as proven by modern science, but then you keep raising objections as if somehow they showed that this is not so! None of them do.

My objection is your use of the sapiens brain expansion concept to declare that all hominins exploded their brains/ skulls by 200cc out of conceptual need.