Introducing the brain: general (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 07:37 (1006 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: … if your God can create a mechanism through which each new design requires and leads to autonomous complexification, why would the same mechanism not autonomously generate new cells when new designs require them?

DAVID: Why is the idea of God giving existing cells autonomy for new design so important to you? You theoretically allow God's design and then demand no God in new design. It seems agnosticism is difficult to defend.

dhw: Nothing to do with agnosticism, and I wish you would answer the question! For the sake of all these discussions, I am accepting that your God may exist. Hence my constant reminder – which you constantly ignore - that the intelligent cell could have been designed by him. Autonomy is key to the question of how evolution works. We only came back to the subject of brain expansion because you tried to use it as an example of your God making changes in advance of any immediate need for them. This seems to me to go against all logic and against all observation. So too do your theories of a divine 3.8-billion-year-old programme and direct dabbling (see below). But I agree with you that the complexities are such that they are best explained by design. Of the four theories on offer (we have to include Darwin’s random mutations), that of the intelligent cell seems to me to fit in best with life’s history.

DAVID: And my response is intelligence needs minds which cells do not have. So how did they become intelligent in your theory?

Why have you suddenly introduced the word “mind”? Cells do not have brains. That does not mean they don’t have some form of intelligence. Nobody knows the origin of intelligence, but as an agnostic, I acknowledge the possibility that there is a God who designed it. Why do you refuse to accept this possibility?

DAVID: Please use fact: our brain, as a prime example makes only a few new neurons for memory. Our brain has handled all the new uses thrown at it over 315,000 years of existence. Implies prepared for future use.

dhw: Once any change of any kind – brain expansion, whale flipper, camel nose, giraffe neck – is made and succeeds, then of course it will be used in the future! That doesn’t mean your God popped in and operated on brains, legs, noses and necks before there was any present need for them!

DAVID: Well, He did it somehow!

dhw: If he exists, yes. See above for the four theories discussed so far.

dhw: Why do you think cells can autonomously create all the connections necessary to cope with the most complex of requirements now, but in the past they were incapable of adding to their number and needed the intervention of your God?

DAVID: Simple. I believe in a God who is the creator.

dhw: Back we go: why could your God the creator not have created the mechanism for expansion as well as complexification?

DAVID: Same answer. A true designer who knows what he wishes to design, does not give the job off to secondhand methods. The outcome is not controlled.

We are talking here about the human brain. So when your God designed the autonomous mechanism for complexification, which he did not control because we are free to come up with the ideas that require complexification, he was not a true designer. Ts, ts.