Often theists claim that science can not understand the “human mind”, “love” for the “soul” although current studies are learning things at an amazing pace.
One of the more difficult issues is that the brain was assumed to be a random bunch of connections which were impossible or at least difficult to map.
There is a new study out, that claims that primate brains, including us have quite a simple structure.
The mind seems to be build in a similar fashion to “core memory” although not working in the exact same way.
This would now seem to refute the Irreducible complexity argument for the human mind. I do not think the ID people like the Discovery Institute claimed the mind as as an example of IC but it is a common theme in debates.
If this proves to be true, we may gain a comprehensive understanding of how the brain works in our life time.
Assuming this is true what biological systems are left that you can claim had to be designed?
Wings, maybe. They’re pretty useless until the bone and musculature of the animal become light enough to allow it to fly (or at least glide). Ironically, though, the irreducible complexity argument is based on a gross oversimplification of the process.
I have not thought about wings but the first thing that came to mind was maybe an adaptation based around mate selection.
That quickly degenerated into anthropomorphism, imagining young dinosaurs, having ate a bit too much aged fruit and saying “oh ya, well watch this”
But, I will have to look into that, obviously I am not an Evolutionary Biologist but getting to a flying squirrel seems easy as a bit more skin flap in the joint would let you jump a bit farther.
That doesn’t get you to the bird/bat wing where the “fingers” are the structure
This sort of nonsense does not make your argument persuasive. That a limited number of people, (a greater number in the U.S., unfortunately), with Fundamentalist or Evangelical backgrounds argue a particular way and happen to be theists does not make their argument a “theist” trait. Starting a discussion in that manner rather makes one look like the religious zealots who begin their discussions with “atheists claim” and then go on to describe some belief that few atheists would recognize.
The problem is that gliding appears to be an evolutionary dead end. Once you become an efficient glider, you are stuck that way. There doesn’t appear to be any evolutionary pathway from gliding to powered flight.
Not really.
The problem with the evolution of tetrapod flight has always been that tetrapods only have four limbs to play with. Evolution of flight in insects is easy, because they had dozens of limbs to play around with, so losing even a dozen to flight wasn’t any hindrance to movement. But with most tetrapods there aren’t any limbs to spare,
By the time that a winged hand becomes remotely useful for powered flight, it has become almost useless for anything else. So there will necessarily be a period where the limb is useless for flying, but equally useless for climbing. That’s why gliding appears to be a dead end. An animals like a flying squirrel or flying frog can be a great glider, but it can’t get airborne, it needs to be able to climb. But if the limbs evolve to the point of being functional wings, the animal can no longer climb and so the ability to glide itself becomes worthless. That’s not say that there is no way for a tetrapod to learn how to fly, just that it is very difficult.
Birds may have managed it because they were already bipedal and, like Tyrannosaurs, their arms were already non-essential. That leaves the option open to develop more advanced wings. But the fact is that even the most primitive fossil birds show remarkably few adaptations to gliding. If you removed the feathers from archaeopteryx it could be easily mistaken for any other theropod dinosaur. This is one of the strongest arguments for the ground up evolution of avian flight. If the most primitive birds were less adapted to gliding than modern birds, it seem pretty clear that the earliest birds didn’t glide, and that birds evolved to glide after they evolved flight.
The evolution of flight in bats and pterosaurs is much more problematic. These are animals that do seems clearly designed for gliding, but we have no transitional fossils. They appear in the record fully formed. Bats, at least, appear to be derived directly from quadrupedal ancestors, which makes the evolution of their wings highly problematic. There are a zillion theories about how bats might have evolved wings, but all of them have serious problems.
You could argue hat this is irreducible complexity, but it’s an argument form ignorance, and the whole thing has degenerated into such a “God of Gaps” argument that it’s not really worth the effort to debunk.
If you wanted to hear from those, this is probably the wrong place. Most of them only last a few weeks around here before they wind up going where they’re not so readily mocked.
Basically they claim that wings assist in climbing inclines and cliffs, and that even absent the ability flight that the wings do still mechanically assist in climbing.
I do not know how valid their claim is but it is plausible that flight would develop by attempting to go up vs. glide.
I have not found any claim they have made for a similar explanation involving bats.
Thank you for sharing Blake this defiantly justifies some more reading on my part.
That’s a very interesting study and if the observation is accurate it’s an exciting step forward.
I think the brain would be a poor choice for the IC “argument”.
A simpler brain could very obviously be useful. Indeed we see millions of examples of simpler brains in nature.
e.g. A fruit fly has a brain with only 100k neurons. We can do computer models of how a fruit fly brain works (we can’t actually emulate it yet AFAIK) and how it results in the fly’s survival and reproduction.
As for consciousness, I think maybe the people on the forums you’ve seen have got confused.
Consciousness is often described by philosophers as an irreducible property of the brain but they don’t mean that there couldn’t be a simpler consciousness within a simpler brain. Or that consciousness could not have come about as an emergent property as the brain became more complex.
They mean something more like the phenomenon of consciousness is not best described reductively. If I describe your consciousness in terms of charges and neurotransmitters then I’m not directly addressing the high-level features such as colour and pain. And when it comes to consciousness, it’s these features we’re actually interested in.
It’s a point that not all philosophers or neuroscientists agree with – some believe that a reductive description will, somehow, address qualia.
The hands as wings structure always left at least one finger, (or several in the case of pterosaurs) free for grasping, grooming, and climbing. There is no reason to assume that reduced functionality is the same as non functionality. Now it is certainly true that they cannot climb with the speed or grace of a squirrel or lemur, but they manage just fine. Since they are better gliders, or can power themselves in flight for a short time, even a midway point species would not be less efficient than either fully developed version.
If you’re intending to address the most common theistic argument about the limits of scientific knowledge with regard to the mind, I think you may have missed the point entirely. All of us have a mind, an interior consciousness with its own memories, thoughts, dreams, preferences, feelings, associations, priorities, and so forth. All of these things are invisible from the outside; that is to say, your senses have no access to my memories, thoughts, &c… Likewise my senses have no access to yours. Yet nonetheless these things exist, because each of us experiences our own mind.
Moreover, human minds are unique. No two are alike.
Therefore, in the human mind, we have something that exists but cannot be replicated, and is therefore not subject to experiment. Experiments that verify facts about the structure of the brain do not touch the question of the contents of the mind. Even if it were fully verified that all memories, thoughts, feelings and so forth could be exactly paired up with physical and chemical events in the brain, it would not give us useful knowledge about why the mind has the memories, thoughts, and so forth that it has, just as knowing that Shakespeare wrote plays with ink on paper does not give us useful knowledge about what his plays say.
The very title of the article you link to - [URL=“Simple 3-D grid structure underlying complexity of primate brain | ScienceDaily”]Simple 3-D Grid Structure Underlying Complexity of Primate Brain](Simple 3-D grid structure underlying complexity of primate brain | ScienceDaily) - contradicts the conclusions you draw from it. The article is not suggesting that the brain is not highly complex, only that there is a previously unsuspected simplicity and symmetry in its high level structure. If you were to open up your computer, you would find that there are only a relatively small number of chips and other components on the motherboard. At that level of description, computers are fairly simple machines. Of course, inside those chips they are very much more complicated, and they need to be in order to do what they do. Likewise, at the detailed level of neuronal connections, the level that matters most for understanding the mind, the brain is indeed extremely complex.
Furthermore, to say this really has noting whatsoever to do with either theism or creationism (which you conflate, but which are really two quite separate things). If anything it is materialists and atheists who have most reason to stress the complexity of the brain, because they want to make it plausible that the brain is adequate to the task of producing such things as human mentality and consciousness, phenomena that theists have traditionally ascribed to an immaterial soul.
There is really no dispute between evolutionists and creationists over whether extremely complex biological systems exist. Both sides agree that they do. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that nearly all biological systems are extremely complex at their deeper levels. The dispute is over whether that complexity could have been produced by natural selection over natural variation,or whether it can only be explained by invoking some sort of “intelligent designer”. The cases that the ID creationists like, that seem (superficially) to be difficult for evolution to explain, are those where simpler or more rudimentary versions of a complex structure, or the individual parts of it without all the others, (a) seem (usually only at a superficial, first glance) not to be exemplified in nature (or the fossil record), and (b) can be portrayed as useless, as not contributing to fitness until teh whole structure in all its complexity has been assembled (examples actually favored by creationists are things like wings, already mentioned in this thread, and bacterial flagella). In that regard, the brain is not a good example from the creationist point of view at all. We can easily see a relatively smooth gradation in nature, even amongst currently living species, from relatively simple (but still functionally very valuable) nerve ganglia, through relatively simple brains, to the highly complex brains of humans. There is not even an apparent problem in imagining how highly complex brains could have evolved through the gradual, incremental processes of natural selection.
“Irreducible Complexity” is non-scientific mumbo-jumbo. There are no biological systems that fall in that category (I won’t even call it a hypothesis).
No direct access, true. But we have plenty of indirect access. And the mind is not unique in this respect. We don’t have direct access to what is going on inside a microprocessor either, despite building in ways of getting at this information. We need to reason based on what we do see at the output.
As expected, considering the difference in detailed connections and experiences. But brains are similar.
This does not follow. Not being able to exactly replicate a given mind does not mean that you can’t copy the brain and produce something relatively similar. And doing so would give us plenty of knowledge, since we’d be able to experiment on a simulated brain in a way we can’t on real brains. Now we have to wait for interesting brain injuries to test hypotheses. Again, using microprocessors as an example, we have simulation models which work at a higher than circuit level. If you have a bug which you could reproduce in simulation, you can diagnose it in no time at all.
Actually what is inside those chips is quite simple, and repetitive.
That is the reason I linked to an image of core memory, computers are incredibly simple machines that have been scaled by repeating those incredibly simple functions to a vast number.
Previous to this discovery, if it proves to be true, it was believed that the connections were pretty random but with the “bus” being this simple it should in theory ease the task of simply understanding exactly what is going on.
I am sorry my OP was written in a way that implicated a large group of theists, as noted earlier that was not the intended message.
It is quite broadly accepted that bacterial flagella may have evolved from the type three secretion system.
Well, in a sense, maybe, but the fact remains that there is a heck of a lot of fine structure inside the chips that is not apparent from an eyeballing of the handful of relatively simply interconnected components on the motherboard, and that fine structure within the chips is actually induced to behave in extremely complex ways. Much of the complexity in computer behavior, it is true, arises from the software (usually several layers deep, and sometimes, at the bottom level, hardwired into the chips as microcode), but the software/hardware distinction does not really apply to brains. It is a virtual certainty that the complexity of behavior produced by neural computation does depend on complex (and plastic) wiring at the micro level.
I do not think anyone much believed that. Complex != random.
Actually, I am not even sure it is true that it has, up to now, been neuroscience orthodoxy that the brain is especially complex at this sort of largish-scale level of organization. After all, there has to be a limit to the degree of structural complexity that can be encoded in the genome. I think it has always been the case that the real complexity is expected to lie at the micro-level of the arrangements of individual synapses, and axonal and dendritic branches, and to arise more from learning than from genetics.
Sure. Who’s saying otherwise? It is (if, as you say, it proves true) a step forward, and an optimism-inducing one. It does look as if things are not going to be quite as hard as we thought they might be. There is still a heck of a long way to go, however.
The fact that you confounded theists and creationists was not the main issue (for me, anyway). Whatever your intentions may have been, it was quite clear that you thought this discovery was somehow relevant to the evolution vs. creation debate. For the reasons given above, I think that is a mistake. It is of no real relevance. The actual arguments of creationists (e.g., the one about the flagellum) are quite bad enough in themselves. We do not need to be foisting straw men onto them.
So let me ask you, do you know how computers work or are you making this argument from ignorance, I have my own PCB mill, pick-and-place robot and re-flow oven at home. All of which I designed, and built the PCB’s for, and wrote the firmware for.
Obviousness I do not have a chip fab at home but we do have a few at the at work. This is not an attack on you, I mostly want to know so I can know what technical level to keep this discussion at.
Actually this discovery is more comparable to the chips themselves, the notion that there is a pattern simplifies the process of reverse engineering the functionality. If this were the only discovery you would have a slight point, however fMRI and other technologies are allowing us to see where things work, now that we have an idea about how those areas may be connected knowing the why is a much more attainable goal.
It is actively used by the Discovery institute as a wedge issue, they may not believe it but I have no reason to doubt they do. One of their key “wedges” is the susposid inability of evolutionary algorithms to select or generate configurations of high specified complexity
Do you notice how in the OP I qualified “If this proves to be true, we may gain a comprehensive understanding of how the brain works in our life time.”
How many times does a person have to concede that they wrote something poorly and it wasn’t what they intended to say in a thread before it is no longer a “viable” ad hominem attack?
Seeing as ad hominem’s aren’t valid in the first place, I shouldn’t be answering this, but the fact I joked about the Discovery Institutes coordinated anti-educational program of “teach the controversy” in the title of the post it should have been pretty obvious which group of theists I was speaking about.
