THE ORIGIN OF MINDS

This book by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham continues to entrance me. I think they’ve got it right, developing a picture of human behavior which is both deterministic and flexible, a behavior model that gives genetics its due as well as allowing for the strong input of personal history. They demonstrate how consciousness may have evolved in response to our animal needs to eat and procreate. They explain how an individual can still have a united sense of himself even though he can only experience himself within the limited window of consciousness. I could almost say that they show the human animal to be a determined individual. Allow me to introduce another couple of passages from their book which, I hope, show some of the steps on the way to their conclusions:

“To do anything—locate food, find a mate, reproduce, compose a sonata, solve an equation—you have to stay alive with enough surplus energy to perform the task at hand. Energy management drove the foundational adaptive design of all ancestral intelligence systems.” (p. 5)

“The key component of this framework [ancestral intelligence systems] is what we call an adaptive representational network [ARN].” (p. 6)

“The main function of the hypothalamus is maintaining homeostasis [the state of being in balance with enough energy to achieve the tasks for maintaining health and procreating].

“... to do it’s job, the hypothalamus receives constant inputs about the state of the body [i.e. energy reserves]...

“Because it [hypothalamus] is sitting in such a pivotal position at the center of its own subcortical empire, the hypothalamus is ideally placed to help the cortex generate the most fundamental kind of self.

“At any point in time, the activational state of the hypothalamic nuclei defines the behavioral problem [sex? or food?, etcetera] that your intelligence system needs to solve.” (p. 64)

Further:

“As your experiences multiply, you build up a dynamic virtual-reality archive of scenes from your life and the adaptive solutions (or failures) to problems you have encountered in the marketplace [the social scene where transactions between yourself and other buyers and traders of social goods, like sex and food, takes place]”. (p. 66)

And finally:

“Over time as your adaptive representational networks [ARN] are constructed—scene by scene, episode by episode—you build up an autobiography.... A sense of personal history emerges. And a sense of causality....

“From this behavioral track record, you have a sense of your performance over time—which allows you to form a composite sense of your self that has continuity. Even though your self-representation is being refashioned moment by moment, there are so many common elements from time T1 to T2, T3,T4, and so on that you tend to experience yourself as a stable construct.” (p. 67)


EXCUSES? DEPENDS ON WHOSE FOOT IS IN THE OTHER SHOE.

Recently a prisoner in temporary custody, awaiting trial in the Spokane, Washington jail was beaten to death and strangled by his deranged cell mates. How he was put into the same cell with crazies is only the first part of the mystery. The second part of the mystery is just what contributed to enraging his cell mates to the point of murdering him.

Right off the bat, I might guess it was the movie the murderers had just watched: “The Passion of the Christ”. I’m sure Christians would agree with me on this one, eh? As they often claim: if you show people murdering one another cruelly or let them listen to angry music, they’re sure to go right out and kill someone. Isn’t that so? I’ve long thought that “The Passion” was no more than a bloody snuff flick, and here’s the proof. Right here in River City.