Big brain evolution: changes in sapiens skull shape;addendum (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, March 16, 2018, 18:39 (2442 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You continue to ignore your own dualistic belief that the s/s/c is the THINKING you. Of course it doesn’t “float around” separately in life. Dualists believe that it only floats around in NDEs and in death, and of course in material life it interfaces with the material you. But your thinking self does not use your brain in order to THINK. It uses your brain in order to gather information that it thinks about, and to give material expression/ implementation to its thoughts. They work together, but the whole point of dualism is that although they are interdependent, interactive, interwoven in life, the s/s/c is the THINKING part of the mechanism. Otherwise, in death, “you” would not and could not be you.

DAVID: Because you choose to ignore my hardware/software analogy we keep discussing past each other.

dhw: I accept the analogy in so far as the software is the immaterial self/soul which does the thinking and which uses the hardware (the material brain) to do the implementing. It is you who refuse to accept the distinction.

You refuse to see the difference in life and death. Again, I believe the s/s/c is changed in quantum mechanism in life and in death, but all it knows remains intact.

DAVID: I do not ignore that the s/s/c is me, my developed personality from the blank slate at birth. But I also believe my consciousness is part of God's universal consciousness which is at the quantum level of reality, and is a quantum mechanism given to my material brain as it is developed in utero. I don't expect you to accept any of this, but as I mull over it, it makes sense to me.

dhw: Wearing my theist hat, I have no problem with any of that (apart from the unnecessary reiteration of “blank slate”). My problem is your continued insistence that the quantum mechanism, which is part of God’s universal consciousness given to your material brain, is incapable of thinking without that material brain, even though you believe that it is the SAME THINKING YOU which survives the death of the brain. Once more: You continue to ignore your own analogy: the immaterial soul (software) does the thinking, and the hardware (material brain) does the implementing. When life ends, the immaterial soul separates from the material self and enters a different world. You keep agreeing that this is your opinion, but then you withdraw your agreement because you want your God to expand the material brain of pre-sapiens before our ancestors can think their immaterial new thoughts.

Answered above.

DAVID: You don't like the idea of compartmentalizing areas of the brain, but it is what science has found. The cabbies and musicians enlarged memory areas enlarging like a library would as it adds books. Einstein's area is frontal conceptual thinking region. I see you comparing apples and oranges.

dhw: My reluctance to compartmentalize is that I simply don’t know the extent to which cognition is confined to the pfc. The point I am making is that if different activities CAUSE different areas of the brain to expand, I see no reason why you should assume that by contrast the pfc had to expand BEFORE Einstein and pre-sapiens were able to think their new thoughts. So long as you insist that the expansion of the brain had to PRECEDE new thoughts, you contradict your own dualistic belief that in life there is a thinking soul (software) and an implementing body (hardware).

If you accept my theory about the s/s/c being slightly different in mechanism in life and death, there is no contradiction. You have refused to do that, for no good reason that I can see. The s/s/c may not have a monolithic unchanged design in the two realms. As far as complex thought is concerned, only more complex computer hardware can do more complex operations. In life the s/s/c MUST use the brain. I am my s/s/c in life but the connection must be through the brain.