Brain complexity: fine-tuned for selective hearing (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 22, 2017, 11:00 (2529 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: None of this means that your God preprogrammed every future function 3.8 billion years ago, expanded/complexified the brain in advance, and then left it hanging around waiting to be used. We know from modern science that the brain responds to new concepts. It does not change before the concepts require change.

DAVID: You keep ignoring the requirements of a survival mode of living. Haven't you ever camped out for a week of so? No phone. No books. Just nature: shelter, movement, finding food, fire, and a small socila group. Literally does not require the brain we have now in an civilized city. How many concepts did humans have 10,000 years ago? A miniscule amount compared to now. Luckily God provided us with one big enough to encompass it all. Where were all the stone age concepts to force a 200 cc final enlargement? Non-existent.

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the minds of our ancestors throughout the approx. 3.5 million years of the stone age, but I would suggest that they might well have come up with such concepts as making and using tools, using fire, making clothes, developing language, all of which would have undergone continued improvements requiring further expansions for their implementation, including the last one. But what you in turn keep ignoring is that the brain RESPONDS to new concepts. It does not change in anticipation of them. I don’t know why you are so preoccupied with camping, but since it’s so important to you, yes I have, probably in far more arduous circumstances than you, when a series of accidents left a group of us stranded on the edge of the Sahara desert! Your survival mode camper and your so-called primitive tribesman have the same sized brain, and no individual can possibly exhaust the full potential of the human mind, but that potential does not depend on the SIZE of the brain, which has stopped expanding! The explosion of advances during the last 10,000 years or so (we have already discussed the reasons for this) has been made through the brain’s ability to COMPLEXIFY. And so if you want to thank your God for anything, it is surely the plasticity, which enabled the brain initially to expand and then to complexify as it implemented and continues to implement new concepts. (See also under “new tasks”).