Big brain evolution: consciousness and brain activity (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, February 17, 2018, 12:24 (2259 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A professor of psychiatry describes the intimate relationship of conscious activity and brain connections:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-approaches-neuroscience.html

QUOTE: "The problem, he says, is that experience has long been thought of as synonymous with behavior, when in fact the two are separate and can influence each other.”

I am astonished to read this. I don’t know of anyone who would regard the two concepts as being synonymous, and the fact that experience can influence behaviour (ask a rape victim) and behaviour can influence experience (if I bop my neighbour on the head, I might well experience and be changed by the pleasures of a prison cell) seems to me so self-evident that I wonder where the professor has been living during these long years. Apologies for my bluntness.

DAVID’s comment: The point I am making is the evidence of the intimate interlocking of our consciousness and brain plasticity working hand in hand. Does consciousness control the brain changes or does the brain change itself in response to the consciousness activity? I see what is shown as brain responsiveness in and of its own actions. The immaterial, by using the brain changes its complexity which is material.

I have no doubt that consciousness (the s/s/c) and the brain work, so to speak, hand in hand, whether you are a dualist or a materialist. And I have no doubt that immaterial thought can change the material brain (as well as other parts of the body). And it seems to me absolutely logical that the same process would have taken place among pre-sapiens species: namely, that the immaterial s/s/c used the material brain and thereby modified it. Size, as you have now agreed, is one form of modification.