Cognitive Thrift 53 – 302 Neurons
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s C. elegans, 302 neurons. It is a roundworm that we have mapped the neurons and interconnections of the neurons as well. It is the only model we have complete understanding of, but we don’t know why they turn left instead of right or right instead of left.
Rick Rosner: So it’s got 302 neurons, not much of a brain, but still a brain. I would argue that even C. elegans with its brain that can fit about 10 of its brains on the head of a pin is capable of some kind of thought and flexibility in behaviour.
And argument number one in this is that sometimes it helps to have flexible behaviour or helping to have alterable behaviour that there is steady, not steady evolutionary pressure, in that sometimes you’re in a good niche and everything is good and you don’t need to have flexibility generation after generation, but I call it steady evolutionary pressure because from time to time across hundreds of millions of years, billions of years, species run into trouble.
Niches change, there’s competition with the species where somebody is always kind of under the gun whether it is the species as the whole or individual members of the species and I’ll probably need to substantiate this at some point, but it’s helpful to have flexible behavior when you’re precluded from using standard behavior or when standard behavior isn’t going to pay off well for you.
Is mental flexibility or is behavioral flexibility linked to mental flexibility a possibility across the spectrum of beings that have neurons, basically? All the way down to C. elegans with its 302 neurons to people. One of the biggest things is that mental flexibility is something that can evolve or has the potential to be there at all levels of cognition and without knowing the math of it.
I would argue that increasing level of mental sophistication, the increasing size of brains and increasing information processing across hundreds of millions of years for the most complex beings mentally at each point in history or pre-history argues that the potential exists at every level.
The potential is not great for C. elegans. It is not going to write any part of a Shakespeare play – no matter how many if it’s a million roundworms at a million typewriters you don’t get Hamlet. Given that you’ve got neurons that are linked and sharing information, C. elegans is probably nowhere near conscious.
It is just a little blip of neurons. I would guess that there is still the possibility that C. elegans if you put it in a number of different situations relevant to a roundworm you will get different behaviors.
Behaviors that look kind of novel if you represent it with a situation that is not a familiar situation. It is not that C. elegans is doing a lot of deep thinking, but it does have the connections between neurons that are processing inputs.
You might surprisingly flexible behavior. It might not be relevant behavior. It might curl up or freak out to the extent that aa 302 neuron thing can freak out, but you will get some kind of flexibility.
I’d argue that that flexibility is a pressure to have some measure of mental flexibility, behavioral flexibility, should consistently throughout evolutionary history – not necessarily every day or every organism, but across history, shows up a zillion times and that it’s an unavoidable part of linked neural inputs that eventually at sufficient levels of complexity function like consciousness.
Mental and behavioral flexibility is available in some kind of proportionality of the size of the brain and maybe the way it’s wired, but we can kind of guess that brains of varying sizes have some commonalities of wiring.
Brains are wired like brains and not like computers. Brains are interconnected among all parts. Computers are linear, at least the computers we have now. Flexibility is possibility, but flexibility. Divergent thought and behavior has costs.
Cost one could be foregone benefits of standard behavior. If you’re not doing weird stuff, you’re doing standard stuff that has a track record of paying off over generations and generations and maybe you’re diverging because you’ve been closed out of standard behavior niche by superior animals or more fit animals, or by a change in the environment.
Cost two is that divergent behavior might not pay off.
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