Brain Expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 09, 2020, 20:50 (1687 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Thursday, April 09, 2020, 21:18

DAVID: Where is "recognition "? My view of your idea is clearer as I stated it.

dhw: I have bolded it, and I have no idea what you meant by it, as you claim you are making my thoughts clearer.

You recognized soul and brain have to work together at the brain's level of thought complexity ability.

DAVID: Why do you constantly ignore my theory which you have recognized in the past. Never pure materialism: The soul always uses the brain it is given, in terms of capacity for new thought or unclear thought in mental illness. The soul can change the brain only through brain plasticity. The only enlargements we know about are small.

dhw: You agreed the dualist’s soul uses the brain to gather information and to implement the soul’s concepts. The soul’s capacity for thought will only be limited by the information at its disposal.... And the small enlargements prove that the brain changes when performing new tasks, so it is not unreasonable to propose that when brains were smaller, they increased their capacity by expanding.

My thoughts are very different from the bold. The soul learns present info through the brain and can think and develop new concepts only up to the extent the brain's complexity allows.

DAVID: His early difficulties mean his brain was different from birth. And certainly learning and theorizing as an adult made some other modifications upon the original different brain.

dhw: Yippee! His difficulties would have been caused by the fact that his brain was unable to provide all the information that normal brains provide - one of the two uses the dualist’s soul makes of the brain. Your second comment confirms the reasonableness of my theory – learning, theorizing, implementing concepts “modify” or change the brain. God does not have to step in and change it BEFORE the thinker can start learning, theorizing and implementing.

Of course Einstein eventually learned to manage his strange brain, and by fifteen, he had self-taught himself all of calculus. Underlying brilliance, with small growth in areas he was learning and memorizing. So what reasonableness? You still want giant jumps just from thinking. I'll never buy it. God causes the expansions. You know we had to learn to use our new big brain. Pure logic: if intense thinking forced the enlargement of the new brain as it occurred, we would not have to learn how to use it, since the previous intense thinking should have been a continuous process into the new brain. How does your theory provide for the time gaps that we know existed? It doesn't

dhw: I still wait to hear what facts you can come up with in support of your own.

DAVID: Why ask me for facts to support my theory?

dhw: Because you keep asking me for facts, and I give them to you. I ask, and you don’t respond.

DAVID: I theorize from facts we know about the brain as you do…

dhw: No you don’t. You merely tell me that the facts I offer you only cover minor expansions and not major, and God does the biggies.

Exactly. My position is that God expands the brain, and your naturalistic approach is concentrated thought forces the brain to expand 200 cc, while all our brain does is one cc here and there as required under plasticity. Logically earlier brains had the same limited plasticity.

DAVID: I prefer my analysis of the known facts as containing much clearer logic. It is based on my dualistic approach as above, that the soul can only produce thought to the complexity level that brain allows.

dhw: I have tried to explain this weird use of “allows”. It only applies to the amount of information that the brain makes available to the dualist’s soul... Einstein had the information that space and time existed and did certain things: it is his theorizing that would have modified his brain.

Weird: the brain gives the soul all the unlimited information available. Einstein's enlargements are fully compatible with known plasticity in tiny enlargements, starting with his strange early brain.

dhw: you continue to ignore my point that it is the FIRST set of artefacts which would have required each expansion, and there is no way of knowing whether the FIRST set was produced after the brain had ALREADY expanded, or the expansion resulted from the effort to design and make the artefact.

No getting away from fact: Each larger-brained fossil lives with better artifacts it created

DAVID: As for your incomplete theory, it is simply a wishful extrapolation of tiny expansions in our brain. Have anything else?

dhw: no wish involved. Just looking for a logical explanation. And I consider these known facts ample reason for proposing that if new tasks change brains today, they may well have done so in former times. The idea that your God must dabble with existing brains before the soul can produce new ideas might well be described as “wishful” thinking, since it positively beggars belief that he would have to fiddle with the brain of every human who comes up with a new idea, even though you believe it is the soul that comes up with new ideas.

Total twist of my approach: Each larger brain is more complex, can allow the soul to produce more complex concepts. The bold implies God working on millions of brain steps. I'm sure tongue-in-cheek, and not serious thought on your part. God only made several enlargement steps