Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 13:57 (2501 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. [...] 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.

dhw: 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. [...] 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.

DAVID: The focus on first sapiensis is to look at the gap in years until the brain they were given was more functionally used.

You have gone back to the 270,000 years of comparative stagnation (see "big brain evolution"), which is no different from the hundreds of thousands of years of comparative stagnation in habilis and erectus, and which proved nothing except that there was an evolutionary pattern. And it doesn’t alter the fact that all organisms (including all pre-sapiens) have/had to experiment and learn, regardless of their brain size. Nothing special in that.

DAVID: As for newborn babies, they have all the instictual behavior you imply and all the automatic (autonomic) functions or they would not live. The differences in your grandsons are very apparent to you now, but not the day they were born. The differences appeared as they developed their brains and understood they had a self and were separate from the outside world. Child studies show this. From a 'thought' standpoint, they start blank.

Sorry, but you’re wrong, although interestingly the differences have changed quite dramatically during this first year of their existence. Ezra was needy and Sonny was placid right from birth. After a year, this has changed. Ezra is more confident and less needy than Sonny, though neither can yet articulate his thoughts. One could spend hours theorizing about it, and of course there may well be further changes. I don’t know what you mean by a “thought standpoint”, but I emphasized that one must not equate consciousness with self-consciousness. I am not saying that newborn babies or even toddlers have anything even approaching the same degree of self-consciousness as a teenager or an adult. My point was that your account was over-simplified, because I do not for one moment believe that the self is a complete blank/zero at birth - hence the concept of nature versus nurture. Newborn babies are not born with identical blank selves, but the self they are born with may well change.