[baudrunner]

When talking about neuro-cortical processes like thought it is tempting to apply various mystical schools of thought on the subject because they all have no doubt based conclusion on instinct, which reaches into the very roots of human evolution. In thinking about thought it might be interesting to find metaphor in the earliest processes that gave rise to living cells, for are we not a manifestation of these same processes, albeit only far more complex?

I have read ten books on the brain. In fact, I have one before me by William H. Calvin titled "How Brains Think". It does illuminate some aspects of the study of the brain, a surprising one to some might be the fact that the cerebral cortex, or gray matter, is only the folded and textured one to two millimetre surface of the brain, and that the rest is composed of white matter, or glial cells, which comprise the scaffolding for the cortex and the support for the network of fibres that allows the neurons of the cortex to communicate with the central mid-brain. However, it is my experience from all my readings including that one that beyond some very interesting case studies of brain-injured people and detailed descriptions of the various parts of the brain itself that I find myself no closer to an understanding of how and why it actually works to produce consciousness and ideation than any one else in the field. They'll be homogonizing rat brains for a long time yet.

But let's go back to the earliest beginnings. Is intelligence separate from the processes that evolved life, that is, did intelligence evolve long after cortexes developed in animals? Was the earliest pre-eukaryotic life intelligent to some degree?

I find rife throughout reality subtle examples of paradox. On the one hand, we have phagocytosis, the wrapping of a life around another and the subsequent breakdown and digestion of that life, as in the amoeba, so that the eater can continue to eat, and on the other hand we have mitosis, as in eukaryotes, where a cell's nucleus divides to reproduce itself. But one leads to the other and the cycle is called survival. More push-pull theory. These processes are mutually dependent. Humans eat and reproduce and yet we don't ascribe the concept of instinct, or even natural biochemical reactions to be the basis for these activities but yet they are. Complexity is all relative. The depth and complexity of these chemical reactions or behaviours are a function of the conditions which are imposed on the life forms who partake of them and of the scope of their being as they exist in the environment for the duration of the time that they are there. Original ideation - that is, to determine the palatability of one's food leading to the decision to eat it - is no different from deciding which groceries to buy. Degree of complexity becomes irrelevent. It is all part and parcel of the same process.

If ten books can't adequately explain how the brain thinks, I can't be expected to reveal it in one short post, so don't all start throwing things all at once.