Introducing the brain: general (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 24, 2022, 15:37 (1001 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I'll repeat. Complexification is simply one necessary part of a designed brain and its functions. A designer does his own designing is my constant reply.

dhw: I’ll repeat. According to you, the process of complexification operates autonomously without your God’s intervention. If he exists, then that is the way he designed it. And so why should he not also have designed cells to autonomously add to their number as well as to complexify?

DAVID: Our only example we have is our brain. Fact: new neurons are vary limited to a small memory area. No enlargement mechanism is seen to exist. You are illogically assuming preceding brains were very different. What the fact supports is logically evolution is over
An enlarged mechanism is seen to exist in a small and limited area.

dhw: One small and limited area is enough to prove that the brain is capable of autonomous expansion!

Complexification is an internal process in our brain that in no way explains how brains got bigger during evolutin.

dhw: In view of our agreement that earlier brains would also have complexified, and new cells would have served to enhance the capacity for complexification, the difference lies only in the fact that in our brains, complexification has been so enhanced that expansion is no longer necessary. I don’t know why this means the end of evolution, or why you’ve even mentioned that, but I’m inclined to agree that our brains and skulls are unlikely to expand any further, since I suggest that they stopped expanding in the first place because further expansion would have required major changes in our anatomy.

Your final idea that 200 cc of more brain would cause major anatomic alterations is a constant very strange theory. Seven ounces is not a very heavy addition to handle.

Varying unequal synapses

DAVID: What makes the extra cells from Habilis to Erectus to Sapiens? God or intelligent neurons?

dhw: I propose intelligent neurons and maybe other brain cells as well. I keep asking you why your God has to do it, since you believe he has given the brain cells the intelligence to do their own complexifying. Your only answer seems to be the vague complaint about "secondhand design", but I'd have thought that if he could design autonomous complexification, he could design autonomous expansion too.

DAVID: We differ as usual. God specifically designs new species. The specific five tier design in our cortex cannot happen by chance.

dhw: Your usual statement of rigid belief as if it were fact. And your usual fall back on the chance argument, as if we hadn’t both rejected that 14 years ago. And still you have failed to offer a single explanation why your God, who designed an AUTONOMOUS mechanism for complexification, could not have enabled the same mechanism to add cells to those that already existed.

Secondhand design is my constant rebuttal. Our brain specifically can only add a few cells. It cannot expand. The only example we have