[tom mccurdy]

Originally Posted by loseyourname I found a little snippet from a book last night that is particularly relevant to this topic: The fundamental principle is deadly simply, but at the same time almost endlessly versatile. Increased complexity will essentially be a matter of adding components of the same basic type; the neurons in a flatworm and the neurons in a human brain work on the same fundamental principles. From which it does not follow, however, that the capacities of the human brain are essentially just those of a densely packed conglomeration of flatworm ganglia. The marvelous thing about electrical circuits is that adding components is not merely a matter of enlarging the system, but sometimes means changing the systems's capacities in novel and remarkable ways. In particular, the evolutionary step that interposes neurons between sensory neurons and motor neurons is revolutionary: it permits the building-in of a basic world-representation, and it can provide for increasingly fancy updating of that world-representation through learning. As the interneuron pool proliferates under evolutionary pressure for more competitive sensorimotor coordination, the innate world-representation improves and the dimensions of plasticitiy ramify. Neurophilosophy, Patricia Smith Churchland

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