Brain Expansion (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 09, 2020, 11:37 (1477 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Wow: your finally explained concept is the thinking soul forces enlargement, or with Einstein, the thought effort made his brain very different. Either soul or natural thought recognize the current brain is inadequate and must be improved (enlarged), but only by force of effort.

dhw: I don’t know why you bring in “recognition”…

DAVID: Where is "recognition "? My view of your idea is clearer as i stated it.

I have bolded it, and I have no idea what you meant by it, although you claim you are making my thoughts clearer.

DAVID: There is no question [Einstein] was born with a strange brain, contra to your attempts to squeeze him into an example of your unsupported theory of brain expansion. Dyslexia is common and often comes with brilliance.

dhw: If you think his strange brain was the cause of his brilliance, then please stop pretending to be a dualist.

DAVID: Why do you constantly ignore my theory which you have recognized in the past. Never pure materialism: The soul always uses the brain it is given, in terms of capacity for new thought or unclear thought as in mental illness. The soul can change the brain only through brain plasticity. The only enlargements we know about are small.

You agreed that the dualist’s soul uses the brain to gather information and to implement the soul’s concepts. The soul’s capacity for thought will only be limited by the information at its disposal. Einstein couldn’t have thought up his new theories if he hadn’t known about space and time. The effort to understand the nature of space and time may (it’s only a theory) have caused changes to certain parts of his brain, just as we know for a fact that learning to read, memorizing routes and playing instruments cause changes to the brain. Of course the brain has to be plastic if it is to change. Why “only”? And the small enlargements prove that the brain changes when performing new tasks, so it is not unreasonable to propose that when brains were smaller, they increased their capacity by expanding.

DAVID: His early difficulties mean his brain was different from birth. And certainly learning and theorizing as an adult made some other modifications upon the original different brain.

Yippee! His difficulties would have been caused by the fact that his brain was unable to provide all the information that normal brains provide - one of the two uses the dualist’s soul makes of the brain. Your second comment confirms the reasonableness of my theory – learning, theorizing, implementing concepts “modify” or change the brain. God does not have to step in and change it BEFORE the thinker can start learning, theorizing and implementing.

dhw: I still wait to hear what facts you can come up with in support of your own.

DAVID: Why ask me for facts to support my theory?

Because you keep asking me for facts, and I give them to you. I ask, and you don’t respond.

DAVID: I theorize from facts we know about the brain as you do…

No you don’t. You merely tell me that the facts I offer you only cover minor expansions and not major, and God does the biggies.

DAVID: I prefer my analysis of the known facts as containing much clearer logic. It is based on my dualistic approach as above, that the soul can only produce thought to the complexity level that brain allows.

I have tried to explain this weird use of “allows”. It only applies to the amount of information that the brain makes available to the dualist’s soul. That is why I keep emphasizing that the concept of a weapon to be thrown from a distance arises entirely out of EXISTING information. Expansion was only required when our homo began the task of designing and producing it. Einstein had the information that space and time existed and did certain things: it is his theorizing that would have modified his brain.

DAVID: Thus each new homo with a larger, more complex brain working with its soul produces new more complex artifacts. All follows along well from thought step to thought step, and it fits Archaeological literature descriptions of what is found and known.

Of course it does, but you continue to ignore my point that it is the FIRST set of artefacts which would have required each expansion, and there is no way of knowing whether the FIRST set was produced after the brain had ALREADY expanded, or the expansion resulted from the effort to design and make the artefact.

DAVID: As for your incomplete theory, it is simply a wishful extrapolation of tiny expansions in our brain. Have anything else?

No wish involved. Just looking for a logical explanation. And I consider these known facts ample reason for proposing that if new tasks change brains today, they may well have done so in former times. The idea that your God must dabble with existing brains before the soul can produce new ideas might well be described as “wishful” thinking, since it positively beggars belief that he would have to fiddle with the brain of every human who comes up with a new idea, even though you believe it is the soul that comes up with new ideas.