Introducing the brain: why so big? Part two (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 06, 2024, 08:32 (41 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The evolution of our brain has been a clear development from earlier brains (you agree), with additions of new cells as required. The complexification of cells takes place without your God’s intervention (you agree), but your God may have given cells this autonomous ABILITY to complexify. (You agree.) […] What are you arguing about?

DAVID: Degree of use!!!

dhw: Of course they are used more now. But you’ve been trying to prove that your God prepared the original sapiens brain for all the new tasks that it would perform, and at one stage you even told us the additional cells had been superfluous (which you later changed to minor use). No, you have agreed that your God – if he exists – gave us the ABILITY to complexify, i.e. to create our own new designs etc.

DAVID: Physical designs are mental. not phenotypical as in speciation.

We are not talking about speciation but about the evolution of the brain. You have agreed to all of the above. If God exists, he gave us the ability to design our machines, art, institutions etc. He did not preprogramme these into the new cells of 300,000 years ago.

I then asked why your God could not have given the same autonomy to other cells.

DAVID: Neurons are very specialized cells, not equivalent to other cells.

dhw: So how come that legs can turn into flippers or light-sensitive cells into eyes or gills into ears?

DAVID: Not necessary. God does it as always.

dhw: You have agreed that brain cells complexify without God “doing it”, and I asked why he could not have given the ability to other cells. You have no answer.

DAVID: The answer is there is no evidence to support your Shapiro theory. The neurons are programmed to complexify in new nets.

There is no evidence that your God inserted a programme into any cells to produce any new complexities. And you have agreed that your God gave us the ABILITY to complexify (i.e. to create our own designs.)

DAVID: Your same role. Diminish God into a secondhand designer, actually a more complex way of achieving a purpose.

dhw: [...] If God’s purpose was a free-for-all, then providing the mechanism would be the ONLY way of achieving his purpose, as you acknowledge with your belief in human free will.[…]

DAVID: God gave up total control by giving us free will.

And that is why it is perfectly possible that (if he exists) he gave up total control by setting in motion a free-for-all, whereby organisms did their own designing.

Not answered.

DAVID: When you finally recognize humans are/were God's primary purpose, it will be clear to you.

Why “primary” when you keep insisting we were his one and only purpose? This is what makes nonsense of the theory that he deliberately designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us and our contemporary species.

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

DAVID: You are stuck with a real gap. Only a designer can explain it.

dhw: That is your rigid but unproven belief, which requires what you yourself acknowledge to be a leap of faith.

DAVID: I just added another new Cambrian, making the gap bigger! Whet proof do you need in your wishful blind hope. It is no longer a theory, but a huge gap.

Nobody has said that the Cambrian Gap is a theory!!! The Cambrian Gap is a real mystery, and there are theories which try to explain it! We have considered three: the fossil record is bound to be incomplete; cellular intelligence may be sufficiently advanced to make major jumps when conditions allow them; there is an unknown, sourceless mind which designed species “de novo”.