Introducing the brain: general (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 11, 2022, 13:30 (1014 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: we see our brain came initially prepared to organize itself. What were all these regions doing 315,000 years ago? Some regions were quite active and some not so much. Deny the brain came unprepared for future use.

dhw: Thank you for agreeing that the brain organizes itself. That is a step forward. So too is your agreement that all the existing cells were used, though to different degrees, and they complexified in response to new ideas. They did not lie around doing nothing. Every stage of expansion would have been needed for PRESENT use, and was able to cope with later uses through complexification until more cells were needed. In our brain complexification has taken over (apart from minor instances of autonomous expansion which support my theory). And shrinkage was the result of previously useful cells being made redundant by the efficiency of complexification. Anything there that seems to you to be illogical?

DAVID: The ability to handle new unexpected uses, implies design in anticipation of new uses.

You’ve got it. We can skip the examples, since you have echoed the following:
dhw: The only “preparation” for future use, then, is the mechanism that enables cells to complexify. You agree that complexification takes place autonomously, and so if your God invented the mechanism for past and present autonomous complexification, why should the same mechanism not have led to autonomous expansion in the past and up to and including our own expansion? […]

DAVID: Expansion requires design anticipating future use. The existing neurons can't do that considering all the parts involved from differing individuals.

If your God exists, then of course he would have designed the mechanisms for complexification and expansion to be used in the future! Once more: you have agreed that the mechanism for complexification works autonomously – i.e. your God does not keep popping in to tell us all what to think, and to fiddle with the neurons to make the necessary connections. And so yet again I ask you why he could not have done the same for expansion. Please don’t just tell me that he couldn’t have done it, or that cells can complexify their connections autonomously but you just happen to know they can’t increase their numbers autonomously.

astrocytes

DAVID: I fully believe everything we find in living material has a reason for its existence. Don't assume anything until we can study it well.

dhw: I agree, but I would go further. Whether your God designed every life form, or cells did their own designing, I “fully believe” that nothing new would come into being if it was not useful at the time. Exit the theory that your God designed species in anticipation of later changes in conditions, and that he provided brains with new cells that would lie around doing nothing for tens of thousands of years.

DAVID: I know your belief. So the enormous new uses of our brain we have now discovered can't imply anticipation 315,000 years ago. Illogical as usual.

All dealt with in detail above and earlier.
Your other posts emphasize the complexities which you say must have been designed. I agree, just as I agree that all the other complexities of complex life forms must have been designed, including the millions of animal, bird, fish and insect brains. But instead of them all being individually designed by your God for the one and only purpose of evolving humans plus food, I suggest that your God (if he exists) may have given to the cells of which they are all composed the autonomous ability to do their own designing (as with the human brain's autonomous ability to complexify, as you have agreed) – which in due course led to all the life forms that had no connection with humans and our food.