Introducing the brain: half a brain is just fine (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, March 16, 2020, 14:08 (1500 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […]You have forgotten my rule. You love to dig into God's reasons. I don't. My guess is the bigger brain contained a complexification mechanism, which as complexity was accomplished the mechanism disappeared. Logical, yes. Correct, only God knows?

dhw: How can I possibly forget your rule, which is that you refuse to answer any awkward question that throws doubt on your personal interpretation of your God’s motives and actions? Your guess makes no sense. How can the mechanism for complexity have disappeared if the brain continues to complexify? Similarly one might ask how can the mechanism for expansion have disappeared if parts of the brain still expand?

DAVID: Good point about complexification. We have to account for the shrinkage so I made the possible assumption too bold. What can be thought is the complexification mechanism complexified itself and is still present in a much smaller form. That seems logical. As for the bolded snipe above you constantly want to guess at God's reasons. I don't doubt my thinking because I do not guess at what I cannot know.

You do so all the time, from the existence of God to all the assumptions that underlie your illogical theory of evolution.

DAVID: I'm sorry I refuse to answer your 'awkward questions' but they are so out in left field that require answers that are just guesses. I'm not avoiding you. I am confronting you with an entirely different approach than yours. I simply accept God's creations, as evidence of his purposes.

With my theist’s hat on, so do I. And I offer alternative interpretations of the evidence, which you accept as being logical but to which you can only raise one objection: humanization. See below.

DAVID: As for expansion of the brain, obviously a very limited form of it exists in this brain , and proves nothing more about ancient brains. In our brain we are dealing with a very specialized result which is built on the past, reflects it but is not the past.

As always, nobody has “proof” of any theory. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the present is not the past. But if the present brain is built on the past brain, there is no reason to assume that its process of changing itself in response to new actions was reversed in the past by changing itself in anticipation of new actions.

dhw: The soul uses the (more) complex mechanisms of the brain to gather information and it uses the (more) complex mechanisms of the brain to implement those concepts. Whereas over and over again, you have the brain doing the conceiving. Do you really want me to produce a list of quotes?

DAVID: My quotes about the brain is a shorthand so I don't rewrite my entire theory each time it comes up. You understand it so quit sniping every time I use it. Lets be considerate of each other.

No, I don’t understand it. The expansion of the brain as the cause of new concepts is crucial to your theory! That is why you make such statements as “an earlier brain cannot conceive what a more advanced brain can conceive and create”; “The existing brain conceives of the new object and makes it. The older smaller brain has nothing to do with it. It can’t conceive of the new idea”; “The second bold does not answer my point that an earlier brain cannot conceive of an idea it is not capable of conceiving;” “Our thinking brain; “the more thoughtful brain has shrunk” etc. I keep reminding you that the dualist’s thinking soul uses the brain for information and implementation. If we take our spear example, the homo has a current problem: how to avoid having to wrestle with a bison. You say that only when God expands his brain can his soul come up with the answer. What new information has the brain provided the soul with? Homo, bison and distance are exactly the same as they were before the expansion. So why, if souls do the thinking and the information they are processing is already present, do you believe dualists’ souls are incapable of having new ideas about existing information until they’ve got bigger brains?

DAVID (under David’s theory of evolution): That necessarily means each enlargement of a brain pan by 200 cc was God's doing. You try to talk around that point by offering naturalistic possibilities, no God involved.

dhw: Of course that’s what your fixed theory means. I’m not talking round it, I’m questioning it! And I see no reason why your God should not have designed the mechanisms for the “naturalistic possibilities”, so please don’t pretend that my various alternatives do not “involve” God.

DAVID: Always a humanized God.

Irrelevant to your false statement “No God involved”.