New Miscellany 2: brain, intelligence, confusion (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 08, 2025, 19:06 (5 days ago) @ dhw

The human brain

DAVID: God produced the complex big brain 315,000 years before its full need and use.

dhw: If your God exists, you can say the same about every single innovation! Did God invent legs because he looked into his crystal ball and saw that one day humans would want to play football? You have agreed that ALL the new cells were used, because they were added in order to meet an existing requirement, and you have agreed that your God does not intervene in complexifications, and we know for a fact that brains complexify IN RESPONSE to new requirements, not in anticipation of them (think of the illiterate women and the taxi drivers).

I disagree. The large new brain added much more than was currently needed.

Cellular intelligence

dhw: I have defended the theory that your God gave humans and bacteria freedom of action, which not only explains theodicy but also explains the 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with us. What’s the problem – other than your refusal to consider any theory that explains what you can’t explain?

dhw: You summed it all up when you described your beliefs as “schizophrenic” and admitted that you “first choose a God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” What follows is sheer confusion.

DAVID: I am not confused about my God.

dhw: No, you are only confused about his purpose, methods and nature, which is why you keep contradicting yourself as well as ridiculing him with your various theories that reduce YOUR all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, all-controlling God to YOUR messy, cumbersome, inefficient and incompetent blunderer. (The adjectives are all yours, not mine.)

DAVID: I am not confused about God. His nature, purpose and methods are quite clear to me. And yes He uses a confusing evolutionary method to produce us.

dhw: His purpose and method are quite clear to you, although you can’t think of a single reason why he would use such an illogical method to fulfil the purpose you impose on him. As for his nature, he apparently has thought patterns and emotions like ours but is not human in any way, may want to be worshipped but is selfless, and is all-powerful and all-knowing but inefficient and incompetent.

You have no training in how to think about God as I do. It limits me.

Comparing bird and human brains

QUOTE: Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal.

dhw: It’s what Shapiro calls “large organisms chauvinism”, and leads many people to underestimate the intelligence of our fellow creatures, from our four-legged friends right down to single cells, which can also process information, communicate, take decisions and send instructions to other cells.

QUOTE: Drift outside the realm of vertebrates, however, and you can generate an intelligent brain in much weirder ways — from our perspective, anyway. “It’s a wild west,” she said. Octopuses, for example, “evolved intelligence in a way that’s completely independent.” Their cognitive structures look nothing like ours, except that they’re built from the same broad type of cell: the neuron.

dhw: And there perhaps is the key. Neurons are cells. And cells find different ways of surviving by using their intelligence and by pooling their intelligences.

DAVID: same sort of intelligent action based on totally different brain organizations. Amazing.

dhw: I agree. And Shapiro simply extends this intelligence to whatever might be the equivalent of a brain in the single cell.

No one neuron is a brain.