Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, March 05, 2018, 12:37 (2455 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: But implementation need not cause enlargement but simply refine the existing networks. Please tell us how implementation causes the enlargement. Development of a concept and implementation occur in the same sized brain all the time in our species. And our brains are demonstrably smaller than in the past as we have learned how to use it efficiently over the recent centuries.

dhw: Of course it “need” not, and we know that the brain has now stopped expanding (at least for the time being) and complexification has taken over. But the brain DID expand. How? I would suggest by the same method as exercise can result in muscle expansion. I don’t know if physical/mental exercise results in additional cells or in the expansion of existing cells, but since brain expansion is a fact, and brain modification as a result of implementation is also a fact, I don’t know why you have so much trouble putting the two together.

DAVID: We only KNOW our species in life. Our heavily used brain has shrunk over the 300,000 years it has been around. That is FACT. Muscles are not surrounded by a hard case. Again: to enlarge a brain in a new species, the skull must be larger And the Mothers must adapt their pelvis.
Further please define 'implementation'. Is it new muscular coordination? Or is it more thinking in design?

I am not disputing the shrinkage, and have suggested an explanation over and over again: the efficiency of complexification has made some cells and connections redundant. That doesn’t mean the brain shrinks with every new implementation! And I keep acknowledging that the skull must expand to accommodate the larger brain and there must be other adaptations to accommodate the change, and I keep pointing out that if your God could dabble the changes or preprogramme them, he could also design a mechanism enabling the cells that make up the brain/skull/pelvis to do it themselves. Even today we see organisms adapting themselves to new conditions, and no 3.8-billion-year computer programme has been discovered, and nobody has seen God reach down and dabble. Whether this adaptability can stretch to major changes and innovation is the moot point, which is why I can only offer it as a hypothesis.

Implementation as you well know is giving material form to an immaterial idea, whether that be verbal or other forms of expression, or the material construction and use of a spear that you once described so graphically yourself. Thinking in design is conceptualization, and according to you is the province of the self/soul/consciousness, and not of the brain, which does the implementing. Hence my pointing out the constantly repeated contradiction in your claim that the self is incapable of “thinking in design” without the larger brain.