Introducing the brain: general (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 27, 2022, 09:06 (970 days ago) @ David Turell

Memory formation

DAVID: You have totally twisted my analogy. The car is programmed for automatic action nd can drive autonomously as a result, by human input in the programming. God's input is in the autonomously acting cell. Perfect explanation of how I correctly use the word 'autonomously' in a different sense than you insisted upon.

dhw: The quote made no mention of a programme for “automatic” action, but I am quite happy with the second part of your analogy: “God’s input is in the autonomously acting cell.” Once he has “programmed” it (i.e. given it the intelligence) to act without his intervention, it acts without his intervention, i.e. he does not programme its actions but provides it with the intelligence to decide what to do and when to do it. Autonomy entails "the ability to make decisions by yourself without being controlled by anyone else" (Longman) - the exact opposite of obeying instructions.

DAVID: Usual distortion of my analogy. The cell has the God-given ability to read and use His onboard instructions. That is exactly what a self-driving car does. Don't deny it!

It is not a distortion of the analogy, because the quote never mentioned any instructions – only the fact that the car operated “without human involvement”, which for the cell = without God’s involvement, which = autonomy. If you had proposed an analogy in which the car operated on the instructions of humans, I would have said straight away that that is the very opposite of autonomy, as it is in the case of cells doing what they are told to do. Your analogy can be made to fit either theory, so forget it.

DAVID: Cells do not have insight into future needs. Only designing minds do. Fully covered before.

dhw: And answered a hundred times: cells RESPOND to current needs. They don’t gaze into a crystal ball to forecast possible future needs. In some cases, their RESPONSE to current needs and conditions is what enables them actually to have a future. That process is called adaptation.

DAVID: Yes, and adaptations are tiny-step responses only to the immediate need. Erectus and sapiens were prepared for enormous steps into the future.

I am arguing that cells do not act in preparation for requirements which do not yet exist. They act in response to existing conditions. In all earlier brains, the brain would have expanded, and the same cells would have complexified for every new requirement until their capacity for complexification was reached. Then they would have needed new cells again for the next new requirement. I find this theory considerably more convincing than the theory that whenever the capacity had been reached, your God peeped into his crystal ball and said “In a few thousand years’ time you’re gonna need some more cells to cope with ideas/inventions/conditions that don’t yet exist, so I'll give 'em to you now.”