This may be too meta for this forum, but I would like to point out that the brain theory as a whole has become so incomprehensibly complex that I am beginning to think that the brain has little to do with intention and memory storage.
Point in fact: as we are now hundreds of years into medical research and we still can't figure out how the brain stores memory. Or what physical structure a memory even is. And I am supposed to believe this all happened by accident? Who is driving the upward development of life if the physical universe tends toward chaos?
Point in fact: we have learned more about brain physiology in the past 30 years than all of history before that. Will our knowledge keep growing or plateau? I don't know, but it is way to early to state that research is at a dead end.
> Who is driving the upward development of life ...
This is begging the question. It presumes a both a who and an intention.
Also, "upward" is an odd take -- spiders / sharks / humans are all equally evolved in that they can trace their lineage to a common ancestor and have been evolving all that time. It seems upward only if one is thinking like that cliched monkey -> caveman -> human illustration.
> ... the physical universe tends toward chaos
It tends toward increasing entropy, not chaos. For sure, there are local pockets of organization, but they are all temporary.
There’s no upward development of life. We think we’re super clever and advanced for building cars and lightbulbs and such, but there’s nothing beyond us saying that’s good or praiseworthy. Looking at our impact on biodiversity, the atmosphere, and the oceans, and throw in a huge dose of micro plastics and rogue hormones in the water supply and we don’t look so clever. Evolution improves fitness for reproduction, there’s not a handy chart or whatever that shows markers for more or less evolved.
Disagree. Look at our solar system or any other planet. There is no life anywhere. This beautiful blue planet is brimming with life.
Yes we are screwing our planet but that is because we as collective have not become fully conscious about it. There were horrific things done in past by humanity but once a sufficient amount of population reached that point of consciousness where we recognise something is bad we shutdown those things.
I know we are screwing this planet bad but life on this planet continues and it's been this way for millions of years.
I don't think that's the point the parent was trying to make. We've evolved intelligence presumably because it was selected for as a trait that made it more likely we'd survive and reproduce. That doesn't mean we're any more "upward" than any other species on the planet that does an equally good job surviving and reproducing.
Yes, we've defined human evolution as "upward" as opposed to other life on Earth, but that's purely our self-description, not anything inherently true about the universe.
I reversed a life-long case of Prosopagnosia after doing some n-of-1 experiments with replenishing my gut bacteria, so it seems plausible to me that losing intestines could impact this.
I also have a friend had her intestines removed due to Crohn's disease. She had an infection from the surgery that put her in a coma she woke up unable to picture things in her head. Hard to say what caused it.
Point in fact: as we are now hundreds of years into medical research and we still can't figure out how the brain stores memory. Or what physical structure a memory even is. And I am supposed to believe this all happened by accident? Who is driving the upward development of life if the physical universe tends toward chaos?