Introducing the brain: general (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 19, 2022, 07:55 (763 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You can't deny the huge frontal lobes of sapiens was finally fully used 315.000 years after arrival.

dhw: Of course I deny it. I believe the frontal lobes of sapiens (which did not suddenly appear out of the blue but evolved gradually) will continue to be used in new ways so long as sapiens survives. And I must repeat that I do not believe your God inserted them into a few pre-sapiens heads thousands of years before they were needed.

DAVID: Simple different point of view as you don't believe in God.

dhw: I don’t disbelieve in God, and these references to my agnosticism are a very poor response to rational arguments concerning the possible motives and methods of your God. This is especially so when your own arguments are so irrational that you can’t explain the logic behind your point of view.

DAVID: You are the one who brought up God again as He relates to the appearance of new brains.

You keep pretending that my non-belief (as opposed to disbelief) in God somehow invalidates all the rational THEISTIC arguments I offer on any of the issues we discuss. Bad idea.

Memory formation

DAVID: Kidneys, lungs, livers, etc. work without God. Why can't the brain?

dhw: Exactly. So why do you go on insisting that past brains could only complexify if God gave them instructions, and could only expand if he operated on them? (I have reinstated this response, as it relates more closely to your own question.)

DAVID: Why must God give off His designing ability?

dhw: You just gave us examples of organs that function without God, and then you asked exactly the question I keep asking: why can’t the brain also work without God?

DAVID: It does in the complexification process.

Thank you. So God “gives off His designing ability”. Now please tell me why he could not possibly have done the same when it came to brains needing additional cells (= expansion) for further complexification.

DAVID: By the way, if you lose a kidney the remaining one enlarges to handle the load. But a damaged brain can't do that, only consolidate what is left.

Interesting to learn how these organs which act independently of your God find their own solutions to new problems. Maybe the answer is that – if he exists – he gave them the intelligence to do so.