Big brain evolution: brain size and intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 11:01 (2188 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I'll stick to my analogy that the brain is a computer using the s/s/c as software.

dhw: I accept your analogy, which you keep agreeing means that the “soul” (software) provides the thought, and uses the brain (hardware) to implements the thought. I don’t know how your response is meant to counter my argument 1) that making and using tools required complex thought and new use of the brain/body, and 2) that if your theory of brain explosion could have led to speciation, then my theory of brain explosion could also have led to speciation.

DAVID: But I insist God speciated the various hominins as their pre-frontal cortex grew and their ability to think increased. You prefer a chance natural growth of brain and skull and change in the female pelvis simultaneously coordinated. Only a planning mind could accomplish that task in the time given for the changes. Your alternative of God given the cell communities the intelligence to do it is still God at work, or haven't you noticed.

I keep repeating that cellular intelligence may be God-given, or haven’t you noticed? The dispute here is not over God but over your insistence that your God directed every stage of evolution, every lifestyle and every natural wonder, and that he did so in order to produce the sapiens brain. “Chance” is not involved in my proposal. Once the perhaps God-given mechanism is in place, the advances are brought about by the intelligence of the cell communities of which all organisms consist. And if your God speciated by expanding the brain, then expansion of the brain as I propose is the same means of speciation.

DAVID:I full well know how the s/s/c interfaces with the brain, and I view the process is that only a more complex brain can permit the s/s/c software to advance to more complex thought.

dhw: Thought is thought, whether more complex or not. If the source of thought is the “soul”, as you profess to believe, then the complexities of the brain cannot be the source of more complex thought. “Soul” software provides the thought, brain hardware implements it, and if you believe in dualism, no amount of obfuscation can justify the claim that the brain must expand (pre-sapiens) or complexify (sapiens) before the soul can think its thoughts, no matter how simple or complex. That is pure materialism.

DAVID: You separate soul software from brain hardware. I view them as intimately interfaced and inseparable. You must see that the material brain is inseparable from the immaterial soul in life. When will you really accept my analogy as you state above.

I have agreed over and over again that in life they are interfaced and inseparable. You cannot lead a material existence without materials! But over and over again you ignore the fact that your own analogy identifies their different FUNCTIONS. Otherwise what is the point of the analogy? Our organs also form interdependent, interactive parts of a unit, but they perform different functions. So what is the function of the software soul, as opposed to the function of the hardware brain? The one provides the thought, and continues to do so after death if your faith is correct, while the other provides information and produces material implementation of immaterial thought. You keep agreeing, and then trying to disagree by pretending that I don’t accept the fact that they work together.

DAVID’s comment (under “memory at molecular level”): The work of the s/s/c is represented by work at the molecular level. No way to separate the material and the immaterial.

Of course you can’t separate them. The s/s/c does the thinking and the molecules do the implementing. In life you can’t have one without the other. But that does not mean they have the same FUNCTION.