Back in the day I used to play a game with my nerd buddies, C-Robots.
This affected me greatly and shaped my thoughts on how to parse what was going on in the command and control system of living critters. With the sensors and motor units available you had to build a machine that could find an enemy unit, engage & destroy it, and not run into walls and kill yourself.
Once you get used to thinking like that it frames how you see these same problems being solved in meat machines.
Take an earthworm. It can smell, move and turn. The olfactory system can detect smell gradients to vary the turning to center the smell of food in a generally forward direction. It has a gut like I do and the gut can signal that what it ate was good or bad. This gets fed back to the olfactory unit to remember what is a good or bad smell and to go to or away in the future. This basic system has been strongly preserved in higher order critters and is actually how humans are affected if they vomit on bad food. You will not be interested in eating that food again for a long time. If you pay attention you will find that the Olfactory system still plays a surprisingly large role in how our primate brains function.
Add in vision and the memory system gets way more important. Mapping gets to be a big thing. Locations where food, water, and shelter might be found are a huge deal. Processing vision into space that can feed into the memory of locations has such a high impact on survival that there would be enormous evolutionary pressure on the development and refinement of specialized hardware to turn egocentric sensing into allocentric locations.
Likewise, feature detectors for things like ripeness using color and judging distance using stereo will offer huge advantages in survival so these will be an essential part of the scene evaluation hardware.
What does it feel like to have all of that high-level parsing collected together, graded for relevance, and tucked into your memory? This network of processing though the agency of the cortex? I call this “your experience” or the contents of consciousness. The current activation pattern of your cortex is what is in your consciousness.
The cortex all works together with this weird filter/route/remember process that is distributed through the whole of the structure. Lashley was onto something with his mass action proposal. While there are distinct island of function that is more a function of connectivity rather than differences in functional structure. The same basic cortical algorithm is at work in all parts of the cortex.
Having a built-in system to identify shapes of your own kind and to be afraid of things that can harm you is highly desirable. It just makes sense to also put in the ability to recognize social and sexual cues. These things are so important to the survival of the gene line that you can’t leave this up to trial and error learning so this is memory is hardwired into our amygdala. You don’t have to learn this stuff - you just know it. This important feature was baked into the lizard brain and is highly conserved. Since this is a subcortical structure we do not experience it in our consciousness but instead - emotionally.
We still have the older lizard brain; being spoon-feed by our fancy cortex, making decisions that are turned into actions - also by our fancy cortex. It has been researched and documented that you experience your decisions AFTER they are made. It seem mysterious because the lizard brain has no representation in the cortex so we have no consciousness of its actions. We have a sense of the actions being initiated in the forebrain. We can evaluate these nacient actions in the cortex and feed the initial evaluations back to the lizard brain for a go/nogo on these plans. But the cortex does not initiate actions; the lizard is the driver of our actions.
Awareness - the stream of sensation reaching our temporal lobe - is not mystical. It is the stuff that evolution has deemed is sufficient to perceive and select useful actions. It just makes sense that we perceive our motion selection system as part of our internal feedback loops. The brain is full of these at all stages of the motor system.
The whole speaking and the mental tricks that language brings with it are a happy accident. Evolution works like that. Sports of design that offer enhanced survival are strongly preserved. I would not be shocked or surprised if speech arises in some other branch of the animal kingdom over the long haul.
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