One way of figuring out what the brain is, is to ask what purposes the brain fulfils for evolution. Apart from high speed control (low speed control can be done by other means than neurons), you can also view the brain as an enabler for speeding evolution, by adapting to body changes. Imagine if evolution had to wait for a mutation in the sensing/control system as well as a change in body plan before it make a body modification. Eyes would have a hard time coming into existence as there would be nothing to process the information they provided in a useful fashion.
So you can see the brain as a system to figure out what body it is in, and what it should be doing and how it should be processing information based on feedback of usefulness of its actions (which don’t change much in evolutionary time, such as food, sex, status and children*). Evolutionary usefulness being indicated by pleasure and other such signals. Yet we are not constrained to try and maximize these signals. Just that behaviours and goal seeking parts of the mind that happen to do things that produce these signals get reinforced. We can choose to avoid getting usefulness signals, as we do when we chose not to take addictive drugs.
I’m not sure if you get any closer to figuring out the consciousness problem. But it might be a start.
The evolutionary nature of the brain is shown perhaps most by how we find baby mammals cute and we wish to take care of them. The part of the brain that deals with kids doesn’t know what type of body it is going to end up in so is indiscriminate in making young-looking mammals cute.
Many species prefer to eat things that look and taste like what their parents fed them, regardless of what that is. When a group of these creatures lands in a new environment, they’ll choose foods randomly, those that chose well will succeed, and evolve a healthy diet in just a few generations, without genetics being involved at all.
While the idea of evolving the ability to evolve faster might be made to work, it needs to be spelled out carefully, lest it attribute foresight to evolution.
Ordinarily you have trait X and you say it increases fitness and goes to fixation in a population, but it’s less obvious how this works with the trait of evolving faster… which is not to say that such a thing is impossible. But you might need to invoke differing long-term survival of large groups of species, or something...
Nerve cells most likely evolved for a different purpose, high speed communication. Adaptivity of this network improves fitness because even when you are in one body you don’t know how big it is (it grows), so you need to send different signals for different size bodies. Also if you can link in extant sensors used for chemotaxic or phototaxic behaviour and use this information in the high speed network without having to re-evolve the behaviours, then you can gain fitness advantages.
I’m saying it smooths out the curves of the search space that evolution is moving in. Rather than having discontinuous jumps between the fitness of (lack of eye, no information processing for eye) and (light sensor, genetic adaption for processing the information from the light sensor), you get the step of (light sensor, some system that can do something with the information) in between. Getting both together is unlikely.
In this respect it plays a similar role to hox genes. Getting symmetrical legs for locomotion (or wings for flight) is unlikely unless you have a modular system.
Rather than having discontinuous jumps between the fitness of (lack of eye, no information processing for eye) and (light sensor, genetic adaption for processing the information from the light sensor), you get the step of (light sensor, some system that can do something with the information) in between.
Yes, this kind of selection for general learning ability is known as the Baldwin effect.
While the idea of evolving the ability to evolve faster might be made to work, it needs to be spelled out carefully, lest it attribute foresight to evolution.
Sex seems to fit the bill here. Clades which reproduce sexually are able to evolve more rapidly in response to changing environments, and the trait of sexual reproduction becomes established in the biota.
I would recommend the 2nd law entropy maximization approach, which attempts to account for instances of increased genetic success by their increase in the rate of entropy generation.
Looking through the Citizendium Life article footnotes, I found this article (footnote 28) that I’m reading now, which does so. It also explores the thermodynamic role that perception plays (in mammals and other organisms), which looks to be a promising piece of the puzzle of consciousness. The article sounds flaky at first, but it’s clearly looking for (what we would call) a reductionist explanation of the purposefulness of complex organisms.
One way of figuring out what the brain is, is to ask what purposes the brain fulfils for evolution. Apart from high speed control (low speed control can be done by other means than neurons), you can also view the brain as an enabler for speeding evolution, by adapting to body changes. Imagine if evolution had to wait for a mutation in the sensing/control system as well as a change in body plan before it make a body modification. Eyes would have a hard time coming into existence as there would be nothing to process the information they provided in a useful fashion.
So you can see the brain as a system to figure out what body it is in, and what it should be doing and how it should be processing information based on feedback of usefulness of its actions (which don’t change much in evolutionary time, such as food, sex, status and children*). Evolutionary usefulness being indicated by pleasure and other such signals. Yet we are not constrained to try and maximize these signals. Just that behaviours and goal seeking parts of the mind that happen to do things that produce these signals get reinforced. We can choose to avoid getting usefulness signals, as we do when we chose not to take addictive drugs.
I’m not sure if you get any closer to figuring out the consciousness problem. But it might be a start.
The evolutionary nature of the brain is shown perhaps most by how we find baby mammals cute and we wish to take care of them. The part of the brain that deals with kids doesn’t know what type of body it is going to end up in so is indiscriminate in making young-looking mammals cute.
Many species prefer to eat things that look and taste like what their parents fed them, regardless of what that is. When a group of these creatures lands in a new environment, they’ll choose foods randomly, those that chose well will succeed, and evolve a healthy diet in just a few generations, without genetics being involved at all.
While the idea of evolving the ability to evolve faster might be made to work, it needs to be spelled out carefully, lest it attribute foresight to evolution.
Ordinarily you have trait X and you say it increases fitness and goes to fixation in a population, but it’s less obvious how this works with the trait of evolving faster… which is not to say that such a thing is impossible. But you might need to invoke differing long-term survival of large groups of species, or something...
Nerve cells most likely evolved for a different purpose, high speed communication. Adaptivity of this network improves fitness because even when you are in one body you don’t know how big it is (it grows), so you need to send different signals for different size bodies. Also if you can link in extant sensors used for chemotaxic or phototaxic behaviour and use this information in the high speed network without having to re-evolve the behaviours, then you can gain fitness advantages.
I’m saying it smooths out the curves of the search space that evolution is moving in. Rather than having discontinuous jumps between the fitness of (lack of eye, no information processing for eye) and (light sensor, genetic adaption for processing the information from the light sensor), you get the step of (light sensor, some system that can do something with the information) in between. Getting both together is unlikely.
In this respect it plays a similar role to hox genes. Getting symmetrical legs for locomotion (or wings for flight) is unlikely unless you have a modular system.
Yes, this kind of selection for general learning ability is known as the Baldwin effect.
True it fits the definition, as long as you allow “change in the environment” to be change in a different gene.
Sex seems to fit the bill here. Clades which reproduce sexually are able to evolve more rapidly in response to changing environments, and the trait of sexual reproduction becomes established in the biota.
This might explain the maintainance of the trait better than how it came to arise in the first place… but maybe that’s good enough.
I would recommend the 2nd law entropy maximization approach, which attempts to account for instances of increased genetic success by their increase in the rate of entropy generation.
Looking through the Citizendium Life article footnotes, I found this article (footnote 28) that I’m reading now, which does so. It also explores the thermodynamic role that perception plays (in mammals and other organisms), which looks to be a promising piece of the puzzle of consciousness. The article sounds flaky at first, but it’s clearly looking for (what we would call) a reductionist explanation of the purposefulness of complex organisms.