kg.
...n e t
howhere didoes a "thing" come from in the first place:
..........not a very thingy place, is it
..........now, thats a w/hole nother thing
AWARENESS before we go ahead and take a closer look at why things are thinks are thinkgs, lets take a big step back: "early mammals were creatures that had been driven to a nocturnal lifestyle, because the competition for food with the dinosaurs and other reptiles was too intense. without the sun on their backs to warm their blood, to stir their metabolism, these diminutive animals had been compelled to evolve their own thermostats. they had become warmblooded. but that innovation brought with it a new problem. to fuel a built-in temperature-control system, you have to eat often and well. some of these nascent mammals were no bigger than a mouse, so they could not gorge themselves on a single kill. they lost body heat fast and burnt calories at a prodigious rate. as a result, they had to feed, or be on the lookout for food, continuously while they were awake. at best, fruit and other plant matter could have served them as hors d' oeuvres. for the main course they had to have a regular intake of animal protein, like insects, and plenty of them. they had to catch these skittery morsels in the dark, so that superb night vision, as well as a keen nose and ears, was essential. and what is more, they had to pursue and hunt their prey, actively, relentlessly. of all the factors, this was the most decisive, because it demanded the fabrication of a more detailed, dynamic mental model of the creature's surroundings, a more potent projection of reality. to survive, the first mammals had to develop a curiosity about their environment, such as had never before existed on earth. they had to peer behind corners, under leaves, everywhere, with intense interest, all their waking time, because if they failed to eat each hour they would probably die. only the best searchers, those with the most inquisitive brains, would live to reproduce. it meant, a complete departure from the old stolid, reptilian approach. and it meant, concomitantly, a massive expansion of neural circuitry in the brain. billions of neurons were needed to integrate the flood of new visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile data, to unite these senses as they had never been properly integrated in the reptiles, and to transform the resulting complex inner model smoothly, millisecond by millisecond. to occupy their niche, they had to be able to fashion a detailed and unified, multisensorial picture of the world around them. the data flowing in from the senses had to be merged internally, and the only way to do that was for the brain to develop a coding system. this involved tagging the incoming data from each sense organ, so that corresponding items of data (giving, say the exact distance and direction of an insect in the dark) could be matched up. that is an awesome computational problem. and it is one that had to be solved over and over again with each passing moment. once this mechanism was in place, the association areas of the mammalian brain properly wired up and the sense fully intergrated, there was somethinkg new on this planet. it was the concept of an object, an object in space and time. and though the mental counterparts of the objects held in the brains of the dawn mammals must still have been vague and only dimly experienced, yet they represented an enormous advance. furthermore, to complement and make full sense of the improved internal reality, there had to be an enhanced participation in that reality. the animal had to act inquisitively in order to find enough food to survive, and the simplest way for that to happen was for it to feel inquisitive. instead of responding passively to isolated stimuli in the way reptilians do, the early mammals became increasingly involved with the mental objects of their experience. they weighed up alternatives, tried out different possibilities (especially through play when young), experienced an inner drive toward some elusive goal. they felt conscious." (david darling, equations of eternity) ................NEXT....part4....coming soon.................. ................part 5 up and running )thingks some&how "out of order"( thinkgnet |