Brain Expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 14, 2020, 20:46 (1473 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You have agreed with me that earlier homos “would also have used their brains to gather information and to implement their concepts.” Once again: if implementation of concepts changes our brains (a proven fact), why is it not possible that the same process applied to earlier brains?

DAVID: I'm sure a habilis brain or an erectus brain had tiny areas of enlargement as our current brain plasticizes. We evolved from them so that is very logical to conclude.

dhw: So why do you think it’s not possible that in the days when major expansion was possible, the same mechanisms could not have operated by major expansion instead of the current complexification?

Why if our current brain is admittedly so different as you've previously stated, the past brains should not be very different, evolutionarily immature and incomplete in development, compared to ours.

DAVID: You are hopefully extrapolating from tiny reasonable changes in our very advanced brain. To remind you, as you remind me, our debate is the possible reason for giant expansions. For habilis, activities of daily living were not very complex. Struggling to conceptualize some way to kill at a distance is not going to force a 200 cc enlargement. One can only think of what one is capable to thinking of in a brain/soul cooperation system.

dhw: Not “hopefully”. I am trying to find a reasonable explanation for something nobody has yet explained, and I see no reason why one should not extrapolate a possible procedure based on one that is already proven.

What is proven is nothing like your extrapolated wishful thought.

dhw: We both used the spear example. Why do you think your God expanded the brain by 200 cc if whatever example you choose did not require it?

Not my God. He evolves as He wishes, not to help homos solve their immediate problems. Still your weird view of my God.

dhw: Hence the vital importance of my argument concerning the FIRST artefacts that accompanied the new brain.

Important only to your invention of a theory about artifacts, not supported by any archaeological report I've read. Can you find one?

dhw: So do you believe that today’s brain has to complexify BEFORE the designer can have his new idea?

No. it is set up from 315,000 years ago to handle the immaterial imagination of advanced designs.

dhw: It is the EFFORT of designing and then making and using the artefact that would have caused the expansion, just as it is the mental EFFORT of reading or memorizing that causes the modern brain to complexify.

As usual I totally reject this wildly imagined scenario. An existing evolving brain can only conceptualize at a level its existing complexity allows the soul to use. Nothing more advanced. Why don't you accept current archaeological theory?

DAVID: You are still pursuing a way to avoid God's activities in evolution. Understandable as an agnostic, but it is much like like atheistic thinking.

dhw: Please stop assuming that any theory different from yours is a way of avoiding God. We have precisely the same situation as with all evolutionary processes: you think your version of God as a total control freak is the only one possible. You already agree that there must be a mechanism for complexification and minor expansion without your God's intervention.

Yes, in our current brain He gave us to use.

dhw: And I see no reason at all why your God should not have designed the mechanism also to engineer major expansion without his intervention. How is that atheistic?

it is a God who gives up exact control the process of evolution. I see Him as fully purposeful in managing evolution to reach His goals; giant bush, humans. You deride my version as a control freak. Note another human version of God from you. You cannot think about God without humanizing. Adler warns about your approach. And you deride his advice, claiming I hide behind him. So I can't think; is that it?