Biological Models

Research and Theory
,
21

Very interesting observation regsrding the zebrafish. After reading Max Bennett’s “A Brief History of Intelligence” (which I highly recommend), I am always very aware of the importance of the chronological placement of a given neural trait or capability in the evolutionary history of the Animal Kingdom, because all traits get inherited and newer traits build upon existing ones at that time. So understanding our complex neural system including our brains is only possible if you at least understand the previous four stages of animal evolution. We are in the fifth stage, based on the 5 breakthroughs in brain organizational paradigms that Bennett postulates have lead to our current state of neural evolution. I would place the zebrafish at the early vertebrate phase, which is stage 3 and very fundamental. Radial fish (stage 1) and bilaterians (stage 2) preceed the vertebrates. We always inherit the core features, because the next breakthrough always requires the previous ones as a foundation.

Hebbian learning (aggregation of inputs) is definitely reused in all later neural developments, while higher levels of organization were added on top.

1 Like
22

Interesting. I began with Hebb’s neural plasticity (“cells that fire together, wire together”) when I first started playing with Computational Psychohistory 20 years ago. That was in my ANN days before I switched to an Agent-Based model. One could spend three lifetimes studying this stuff. I try not to comment here in TBP too much because I’m really just a GOFAI-on-a-PalmComputer type :upside_down_face:

23

A related curiosity…

Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) argued that consciousness—as typically defined, involving introspection, self-awareness, and an inner narrative—emerged only a few thousand years ago.

He proposed that one hemisphere of the brain carried the historical knowledge which the other hemisphere experienced as the voices(or even visions) of gods or ancestors, whose commands people followed.

According to Jaynes, ancient humans did not introspect or make decisions through self-generated deliberation; instead, they relied on these hallucinated voices for guidance, structure, and social coordination. He cites early literature, such as the Iliad, which rarely shows introspection but frequently depicts characters directed by perceived “divine” voices.

Jaynes claims this bicameral mode began to deteriorate during the second millennium BCE as societies grew more complex. Urbanization, population increases, warfare, natural disasters, and cultural mixing created conditions that overwhelmed the hallucinated system. In this environment, individuals developed new cognitive strategies—metaphor, inner narrative, self-reflection, and deliberate problem-solving.

Jaynes points to texts like the Odyssey and the Old Testament, as examples of the earliest evidence of characters displaying doubt, introspective thought, and internal moral questioning.

Jaynes supports his theory with material from ancient literature, archaeology, neurology, and psychology. He further suggests that remnants of the bicameral mentality remain in modern phenomena such as schizophrenia, hypnosis, religious visions, and auditory hallucinations, which he interprets as echoes of earlier cognitive structures.

______

This doesn’t at all invalidate how the cerebral cortex worked 3 thousand years ago.

While in Jaynes framework the “right” brain did more of the modeling and the “left” brain ran operations with respect to the world, A Thousand Brains still provides an explanation for how all of this works

As societies bumped up against each other, the societal knowledge embodied in the right brain had no context to understand the new environment. Survival (and not all such societies survived) would have depended on internalizing consciousness and introspection, which would have provided additional adaptability.

1 Like