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

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 18:52 (1499 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your theory is: The effort to find a new concept doesn't need a new complex brain expansion, but building the new artifact does it!

dhw: Not just building it, but working out the detailed design of something that has never been thought of before! What you called “abstract thinking”. In our modern examples (illiterates, taxi drivers, musicians, possibly Einstein) it is the mental effort that causes minor expansion. With our spear example it would be the mental effort plus instructions to the brain to get the body to give physical form to the concept (implementation).

DAVID: Backward, inside out illogical thought. Abstract envisioning of a new artifact and how to build it is the key step. Actually constructing it is the easy part. I know. I've designed and built things (sheds and barns). I've designed two homes; also two medical clinics, two dialysis units, two business offices and two x-ray departments as part of my work at my clinic, all accepted by the other doctors and the architects as having excellent traffic flow. The later construction was the easy part as blue-collar folks followed the instructions.

dhw: I have nothing but admiration for your extraordinary range of talents, but in designing and building, you were using existing information that would not have been available to the very first inventor of dialysis units and x-rays and even such things as doors and windows.

Totally beside the point. At all stages of hominin, homo development, the new species used the inventions of the past in going forward with developments from what was presently known. The recent Erectus article shows that. ( Thursday, March 05, 2020, 21:40 ) By the way, as a resident in medicine at Western Reserve I worked with the inventor of the bathtub dialysis unit, and I literally made the dialysis solution in the tub mixing it with a broom handle!! No worry!! The blood came through separated. Compact units were developed 5-15 years later, based on his work and that of many others.

dhw: The FIRST artefacts would have been the product(s) resulting from whatever concept(s) CAUSED the pre-sapiens brain to expand to sapiens size. There is no way anyone can possibly prove or disprove this, because an artefact can only exist once the brain has finished expanding through the effort to design and make it.

Or, my opposite view, only the newly enlarged brain could develop the new concept/concepts and produce the artifact products.

DAVID: The bold is still your reversal theory of the series of events archaeologists appear to believe.

dhw: I’ve no idea what they believe. How many of them have specified that God expanded the pre-sapiens brain, and only then was it possible for the soul to conceive of a spear?

My thoughts about their beliefs comes from how they produce and present their studies. God is never an issue.