Brain complexity: fine-tuned for selective hearing (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 14, 2017, 11:17 (2318 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [...] you asked how a natural process could know what future functions might be needed in a future brain (as if your God must have anticipated and preprogrammed them all). My response explains why I do not think they were all preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago. No clairvoyance needed, because the brain complexifies in RESPONSE to and not in anticipation of new concepts.

DAVID: The answer is in the other thread. The highly complex pre-frontal cortex from 300,000 years ago was waiting to be used and when needed to happen, complexify more, and actually shrink a bit in mass.

Again, why “waiting to be used”? Do you think early sapiens sat there like a dummy for 290,000 years? The already highly complex brain had reached its optimum size 300,000 years ago, and so from then on it had to complexify even more in order to implement new concepts. 10,000 years ago there was an explosion of new concepts, and so it is not unreasonable to assume that the brain would have undergone even more complexification than before, and did it so efficiently that it shrank a little. None of this means that your God preprogrammed every future function 3.8 billion years ago, expanded/complexified the brain in advance, and then left it hanging around waiting to be used. We know from modern science that the brain responds to new concepts. It does not change before the concepts require change.

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I have run out of time, so I will have to leave your new posts till tomorrow.