So the code that wires a 100-trillion-synapse human brain is about 7.5 megabytes. Now an adult human contains a lot more information than this.
Minor quibble which seems to have implications—“There is a consensus that there are roughly about 100 billion neurons total in the human brain. Each of these neurons can have up to 15,000 connections with other neurons via synapses”
My rough understanding is that babies’ brains greatly increase how many synapses there are until age 2 or 3, then these are eliminated or become silent in older children and adults. But this implies that there’s a ton of connections, and most of the conditioning and construction of the structure is environmental, not build into the structure via genetics.
I think this is a very good point.. Evolution has given humans the brain plasticity to create brain connectivity so that a predisposition for morality can be turned into a fully fledged sense of morality. There is, for sure, likely some basic structure in the brain that predisposes us to develop morality but I’d be of the view the crucial basic genes that control this structure are, firstly present in primates, and at least, other mammals, and, secondly, the mutations in these genes required to generate the morally inclined human brain, are far fewer than need be represented by 7.5 MB of information.
One thing both the genome and evolution have taught us is that huge complexity of function and purpose can be generated by a relatively small amount of seed information
Minor quibble which seems to have implications—“There is a consensus that there are roughly about 100 billion neurons total in the human brain. Each of these neurons can have up to 15,000 connections with other neurons via synapses”
My rough understanding is that babies’ brains greatly increase how many synapses there are until age 2 or 3, then these are eliminated or become silent in older children and adults. But this implies that there’s a ton of connections, and most of the conditioning and construction of the structure is environmental, not build into the structure via genetics.
I think this is a very good point.. Evolution has given humans the brain plasticity to create brain connectivity so that a predisposition for morality can be turned into a fully fledged sense of morality. There is, for sure, likely some basic structure in the brain that predisposes us to develop morality but I’d be of the view the crucial basic genes that control this structure are, firstly present in primates, and at least, other mammals, and, secondly, the mutations in these genes required to generate the morally inclined human brain, are far fewer than need be represented by 7.5 MB of information.
One thing both the genome and evolution have taught us is that huge complexity of function and purpose can be generated by a relatively small amount of seed information