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

by dhw, Sunday, April 13, 2025, 09:18 (2 days ago) @ David Turell

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).

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

Much more WHAT? The size (= number of cells) remained the same! The brain did not/could not expand any more. And so the capacity for COMPLEXIFICATION increased. And complexification only occurs when there are new tasks to perform. It does not complexify IN ANTICIPATION of conditions that do not yet exist!

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: […] No one neuron is a brain.

Of course it isn’t. Nobody said it was! The theory is that single cells are intelligent, and so they must have the equivalent of a brain, which enables them to process information, pass it on to other cells through communication, take decisions, and give instructions. You have accepted the autonomous intelligence of single cells in the form of bacteria, but for some reason you think that when single cells form communities (i.e. pool their intelligence), they are helpless unless your God gives them instructions to be nice to us or to murder us.

Cellular intelligence

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.

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

The fact that apparently your “training” limits you to prejudgements, (you start with the form of God you wish to believe in), which you admit are your own and are far from “mainstream” theology, is hardly a recommendation. The endless contradictions, and your confessions that you yourself can’t find any logic in your theories, ought to suggest to you that these may be wrong, and perhaps it’s time you opened your mind to other possible views that are not so limited as yours.

Hunter gatherers in Malta

QUOTE: The implication, Scerri says, is that hunter-gatherers were “seafaring all over the place'”.

DAVID: we were amazingly clever back then.

And this ties in with the theory that early brains would have expanded and complexified in a continuous process, and sapiens brain cells would all have been in use early on in that process, rather than your God conducting operation after operation as he looked into his crystal ball to see what his hominins and hominids might want to do next.

Evolving a bipedal birth canal

DAVID: how female pelvic size adjusted to increasing fetal head size is amazing and suggests a dsigner at work.

You don’t need me to tell you that the poor design of the female pelvis is one of the arguments used by atheists! The demands made by bipedalism and by the increased size of the fetal head are regarded as reasons why human childbirth is such a difficult and dangerous process, whereas most other animals manage far more easily. Another example of your God’s inefficiency and incompetence, which you are always so keen to stress? Or perhaps the problem has proved too difficult for the limited intelligence of the respective cell communities to solve?