Introducing the brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 28, 2018, 15:05 (2369 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: The dualist’s “you” in this earthly life is supposed be a combination of mind and body, or soul and brain if you prefer. Your soul and brain do not use your soul through your brain: the two parts of “you” work together to compose the living “you”, but they have different functions, as exemplified by your analogy of the thinking software and the implementing hardware. Otherwise your analogy for dualism (= TWO components) makes no sense, especially when you argue that the soul CANNOT think without the brain, but the soul CAN think without the brain when there isn’t a brain.

You refuse to recognize my theory that the soul has two mechanisms of action in life and death. Your theories about soul are not the only ones available.

dhw: Back we go to your other digression! Complexification and limited expansion are also known facts in the sapiens brain, and expansion is a known fact in the pre-sapiens brain. There is no evidence of shrinkage in the pre-sapiens brain. What is your objection to the explanation for shrinkage that I keep offering? (Continued overall expansion would have given us elephant-sized heads. Enhanced complexification resulted in some cells becoming superfluous, and so the brain shrunk. The existing capacity still allows for the expansion of individual sections of the brain.)

DAVID: Not a digression. I'm simply repeating the only facts we know about a thinking brain. And a brain with obviously lots more thinking capacity than those previously evolved.

dhw: According to you, the only fact we know is shrinkage. You still haven’t said why you object to my explanation of it, and you ignore the other facts revealed by modern scientific research, that the modern brain expands (though in limited areas) and complexifies. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the pre-sapiens brain did the same. The “thinking brain” is the province of the materialist; the thinking soul is the province of the dualist. I do not doubt that our “thinking capacity” is greater than that of pre-sapiens. If you think that is because of our larger brains, you are a materialist. Nothing wrong with that at all, except that you claim to be a dualist.

And you blithely skip over 150 cc of brain volume loss since sapiens appeared. Sure areas are seen to have enlarged, but overall you skip the 150 cc loss. When I discuss a brain thinking, it is under the control of the software soul.