Brain expansion (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 02, 2020, 13:54 (1633 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your opinion, which you think is a fact, is that your God designed a mechanism for autonomous complexification without his having to dabble, but he could not have designed a mechanism for autonomous expansion without his having to dabble. I asked you why not.

DAVID: What you miss is our brain has A complexification method which is under instructions as to how to do it.

First you agree that it’s autonomous, and then back you go to nebulous guidelines and instructions! You do the same again in the next response and also later in your post! Please explain what “instructions” you are talking about.

DAVID: My guesses as to how God controls evolution I admit are my guesses. An autonomous mechanism would come with guidelines. […] My God would not allow just any possible variety of result and drive evolution off His desired course.

dhw: Your guidelines turn out to be a 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for targeted brain expansion – not to mention bee leaf-biting – or personal dabbling, i.e. the exact opposite of autonomy. …Let me repeat my proposal:

Pre-sapiens expansion took place in those areas of the brain that needed to expand their capacity for thinking (materialist view, inapplicable to dualists who attribute thought to the soul), gathering information and giving material expression to thoughts/concepts/ ideas/ aspirations/desires and all the other non-material aspects of the mind-brain interaction. Now I’m sure you’re not trying to tell me that your God wanted to direct all the individual thoughts etc. of all the individual pre-sapiens homos and hominins, so what do you see as the threat to his “desired course” if he invented a mechanism that autonomously expanded the brain in the manner I have described and bolded? Please bear in mind that these processes have now been taken over largely by complexification in the modern brain, and this apparently is an autonomous mechanism, since you don’t seem to think your God dabbles with it.

DAVID: No need for dabbling. Complexification controls noted above. The neurons follow built-in rules.

There you go again. No need for dabbling, so what controls/guidelines/instructions/built-in rules are these? They all turn out to be either a 3.8-billion-year old computer programme or dabbling. This time it’s the 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for every brain response to every new requirement. Can’t you see how ridiculous that is? And how much simpler it all is once you accept the possibility that there is a mechanism enabling the cells of all organs (including the brain) and organisms to respond autonomously to the vast range of demands made on them?

DAVID: Also your comparison is false. You want uncontrolled speciation in brain enlargement. Complexification is in an established new species. Apples and eggs.

You proposed and I agreed that complexification must also have taken place in pre-sapiens brains. The comparison lies in the process of the brain responding to requirements. What do you mean by “speciation in brain enlargement”? We have divided different homos and hominins into “species” whenever they had different features, including different brain sizes. What does that have to do with the mechanics of brain enlargement? The process would have been the same in all of them. So instead of repeating that he could only have designed such an “autonomous” mechanism if it had NOT been autonomous (but each change had been preprogrammed or dabbled), please explain why he could NOT have designed an autonomous mechanism. If your answer is that he wanted to control every response to every requirement, please acknowledge that such an answer is pure guesswork and has no more validity than a guess that he wanted to allow for a variety of responses – which is precisely what the mechanism achieved (varieties of hominins and homos).