Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 13:52 (2502 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID's comment: A very clear example of how the soul/self/consciousness/brain had to start from zero to learn every function of s/s/c/brain activity. A newborn baby does this over a 25- year period when the frontal lobe is fully developed. Note the importance of this point. A person's completeness requires the brain to be fully developed. The s/s/c can only use what the brain offers for use from the beginning of a new life. One can see that the first sapiens also had a partial blank slate which had to be experimented with and learned how to use it. The brilliant ones taught the slower learners over the 270,000 years, as dhw has pointed out.

This is far too simple. There were marked differences of character (self/soul) in my twin (non-identical) grandsons from the very moment they were born. The self does not start from zero. From the moment any child is born, it can cry or not cry in reaction to conditions, but we don’t always know why it is crying (hunger, discomfort, pain?). The same assumptions are made about animals – just because they can’t explain things to us, some folk think they have no feelings and no individuality. (But consciousness should not be equated with self-consciousness.) Of course, though, you are right about brain development and activity. As I keep repeating in posts about the brain, it provides the information which (dualistic version) the self/soul/consciousness processes and uses, and the more the brain develops, the more information it will provide, and so the more the self learns and can act on. But no organism is born with a blank slate self/soul. As for sapiens, his soul would have had far more information to absorb than all his predecessors, thanks to all the new concepts they had come up with and implemented before the final expansion. Every organism on earth has to experiment and learn how to use the brain (or brain equivalent) they were born with, so I don't know why you focus only on the first sapiens.