Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 26, 2018, 15:27 (2371 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Software and hardware are designed to work together as capacity is enlarged. Obviously thought must initiate implementation, as they work together.

dhw: I have never disputed the fact that soul/software and brain/hardware work together. But they fulfil different functions: the former provides the thought and the latter implements the thought. That is the whole point of this metaphor for dualism. If you believe the programmes have not already been designed before the software is inserted into the computer, then please say so.

You sit at a computer and your thinking drives your fingers to type the thought which appear before you in words. The software is your servant. What is your question?

DAVID: The frontal lobe capacity for working with the soul is the exact point. The soul is a non-material mechanism that is tied to the human brain networks to think. Since neither of us know what is real, my theory is just as likely as yours.

dhw: The dualist’s brain and soul work together in earthly life, but that is not the “exact point”. The “exact point” is that they perform different functions, as above, and that is why it is logical to argue that the immaterial thinking self can live on without the brain, and it is illogical to argue that the immaterial thinking self cannot think without the brain, until it doesn’t have a brain to think with.

My theory is the soul is a quantum malleable mechanism that can change as I have described. You want a rigid unchanging form.

dhw: Once again you resort to one of your digressions, to which I give the same answer every time: any major change in the body will require major changes elsewhere in the body.
DAVID: Which changes require complex design changes in a speciation. It is still only chance or design, to which you have never offered anything substantive, since there is nothing else.

dhw: You scuttled from the findings of modern science to the female pelvis, and from there to chance v design (and I dealt earlier with your other favourite digression of shrinkage). In the theistic version of my theory, your God has designed the mechanism which enables cells/cell communities to do their own designing. Chance has no place. Now please tell me why it is illogical to argue that since modern science tells us that the sapiens brain expands and complexifies as a result of thought, the same process may have taken place in the pre-sapiens brain.

You have scuttled to God, as usual, when you have no answer. The only brain we know has shrunk 150 cc since it appeared. It is the only fact we can extrapolate to the past forms of brains. Known areas of enlargement ( taxi drivers) occurred as the brain shrunk! That is consistent thinking about expansion.