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

by David Turell , Monday, March 19, 2018, 16:23 (2439 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You have just contradicted yourself. I am in full agreement with my bolded statement of yours. In life I believe the s/s/c must think WITH the brain during life. It is obligated to do so. But not the next statement of yours, which, therefore, doesn't follow.
dhw: Do you or do you not agree that the software (s/s/c) does the thinking and the hardware (brain) does the implementing? If you agree, as you have already done umpteen times, and if the same thinking “you” is supposed to survive the death of the brain (even if it thinks about different things in death), how can you claim that the s/s/c cannot THINK without the brain?

You continually ignore my point that in life the s/s/c is intimately connected to the brain and must use it to think. Neither you nor I can think if our brain is not working properly. Think a drunken stupor, or schizophrenia as misrepresentations of a normal s/s/c. Death or NDE are different circumstances and my theory is that the s/s/c is free to think on its own with possibly a slightly different construction or mechanism.

DAVID: I do not believe the s/s/c thinks before the brain gets it. You are imagining a time sequence. They work together thinking simultaneously, because they are intimately interfaced in life . Brain implementation than follows under s/s/c direction. They never are separate in time.

dhw: In dualism, when the mind instructs, the brain may respond instantly but if, for instance, the learning process or the material implementation is slow, the changes to the brain may not be instantaneous. I don’t know how this line of argument is supposed to prove that the mind cannot think new thoughts unless the implementing brain has already changed before receiving the thoughts it is going to respond to (your God expanding the pre-sapiens brain before pre-sapiens is able to think of new concepts).

You cannot deny that sapiens thought is markedly more complex than erectus, and that is due to our giant pre-frontal cortex. The size and complexity is required. We differ only in how we evolved the brain.

dhw: Once again: the argument concerns your insistence that the pre-sapiens s/s/c could not think of new thoughts until your God had expanded his brain, which means that thought depends on the brain and not on the s/s/c. And this is contradicted by your belief that the thinking s/s/c survives the death of the brain, when it will have different things to think about and no material means of implementing thoughts.

Once again you specifically ignore the reasonable concept that the brain is a form of hardware and the s/s/c is a form of software, probably at a quantum level, with the result that complex thought requires complex neuronal networks in the prefrontal cortex.

DAVID: Strange stretch of logic. I am discussing the degree of intelligence, IQ, the brain allows not intelligence itself!

dhw: Badly phrased by me. You are faced with the prospect of an afterlife without your personal degree of intelligence, which apparently depends on the type of brain you have.

Whatever is contained in my s/s/c in life is also present in death totally unchanged. It is obvious that the living brain allows different levels of intelligence.

DAVID: The brain offers a basic substrate but I am fully aware that factors improve or reduce the IQ, but only a few can achieve genius status […] As for blank slate, the fetus brain operates at a sensory and muscle level in the womb, but development of personality and therefore content of s/s/c starts at birth tightly interfaced with the brain, guided by genetics, nurturing controls and also other uncontrolled events.

dhw: And according to you the s/s/c depends on (a) the type of brain you are born with, and (b) genetics – which you are also born with and which constitutes 40% of the s/s/c. Hardly a blank slate. But of course it takes time and experience for all the inborn characteristics of brain type and genetics to emerge, and nobody knows the extent to which the given 40% may be changed by nurturing controls and other uncontrolled events.

We really don't differ much in the definition of blank slate. You look to genetic guidelines to say it isn't blank at birth, and I say it starts blank at birth and is molded by the guidlines from day one.