Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 30, 2017, 14:58 (2550 days ago) @ dhw

I am combining the two “brain complexity threads” to avoid undue repetition, and will edit accordingly. “Learning new tasks” is the more relevant heading.

DAVID: The reason I brought up indigenous folks is 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?

Dhw:... Do you think “indigenous” people have no language, culture, social life, tools, housing? Some even believe in gods.... You might say that they have not developed as much of the brain’s potential for complexity as you have. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that if the brain changes as a RESPONSE to new demands, its pre-sapiens expansions and current sapiens complexifications would not have taken place BEFORE the demands were made! And THAT is the issue we are discussing.

That is exactly the point. You have introduced the nebulous concept of 'demands'. What demands could a people with smaller brains have if as I maintain they could not think of them as possibilities. The indigenous have made small demands on their giant brains because they haven't expanded their concepts of how to live as we do. They live little beyond the H. erectus life style.

dhw: If you agree that the brain changes in RESPONSE to concepts and efforts to implement them, as proven by modern science, and not beforehand, then it makes no sense to claim that in the past the brain changed BEFORE hominins had the concepts and tried to implement them. That would be like saying that today the Indian women’s brains rewired before they learned to write.

DAVID: And here you backtrack and twist the concept that early brains could expand/contract with new uses. Of course they did.

dhw: And here you continue to focus on what may have happened before brains expanded permanently, whereas we are trying to find out why they expanded permanently. Your only answer is “God did it either directly or by pre-programming”, and you insist that he did so BEFORE hominins came up with their new concepts. And yet you agreed when I wrote that 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.”

I agreed: Of course it expands within its watery blanket, and then it contracts! The contraction is just as important as the expansion as part of the resident mechanism of the brain learning something new.. You keep trying to ignore that to develop your expansion theory.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: What “sapiens brain expansion concept”? The sapiens brain has stopped expanding. The argument is that all permanent pre-sapiens expansions occurred as a result of the proven process whereby brains change in RESPONSE to new demands and not beforehand. You have agreed, and yet you still insist that pre-sapiens brains underwent their permanent expansions BEFORE the demands were made!

You agree with me that most probably pre-sapiens brains expanded and contracted. Then you keep trying to skip the contraction part in explaining why brains/skulls enlarged by 200cc. I will stick with God providing the change.