Les Sleeth said:
Did you site this ". . . an enormous amount of research has revealed that the brain never stops changing and adjusting" to suggest that every, single, individual bit of learning we do is accompanied by some brain development? If that is so, I would love to see the study that proves that.
It would be practically impossible to prove something like that conclusively even for a single person; you'd have to keep track of the structure of every single neuron in that person's brain over the course of his lifetime. Still, it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that that is how all learning and memory works. If an instance of learning does not result in a change in neural architecture-- i.e., if its effect is not somehow physically stored-- how could it go on to have discernible effects down the road? The only metaphysics in which such a thing is even comprehensible is interactionist dualism, which IMO is not a terribly appealing worldview.
Personally, I believe I learn certain things that are brain independent, and which the brain cannot possibly develop anything to help with. And given your claim that consciousness is not purely physical, it would seem you believe that too.
Not at all! Following Chalmers, I believe physicalism cannot crack the hard problem, but it does just fine with the 'easy' problems. Learning and memory are among the easy problems-- they are just functional entities, and so are amenable to the kind of structural/functional account physicalism can provide.
In fact, according to the view I currently favor, there is nothing more to the mind than the brain; the trick is that the physical account of the brain is not a complete account. What is missing is the intrinsic basis of the extrinsic phenomena described by the physical account, and subjective experience fills in as that intrinsic basis. This view covers up for the failure of physics to entail subjective experience, but it honors the physical account as telling the complete structural/functional story; furthermore, since subjective experience performs the role of underpinning extrinsic phenomena, it is not causally irrelevant and so epiphenomenalism is avoided as well.
In any case, I didn't say the brain stops changing. You seem to be equating memory with the development of individuality. All I've claimed is that experience develops individuality, and that that development is not totally dependent on new neuronal pathways.
Learned skills and long term memories are underpinned by neural processes; long term changes and developments through these faculties are accompanied by long term changes in the accompanying neural architecture. I don't know exactly what you mean by individuality, but I find it likely that for whatever aspect you could name, the same general sort of story would hold.
For instance, it's been well established that personality is underpinned by neural processes in cortex. It's been shown that damage to cortex can drastically change one's personality; considering this and the facts about learning and memory, it's a small step to believe that more benign long term changes in personality are also reflected in long term changes in neural architecture (in this case, somewhere in the cortex).
And it isn't so that Bob can't learn new skills. Studies have shown that someone who has lost short term memory will forget the specifics of a piano lesson shortly after being taught. But over time, they seem to play tunes without the slightest idea of how they learned them.
That's not a counterexample. I don't know the extent to which they've studied these subjects, but almost certainly their learning of new skills has been accompanied by changes in their neural architecture. That they have no short term memory does not at all imply that their brains are no longer plastic. Bob, by definition, cannot have anything about the structure of his brain change.
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