6. Cognitive Learning (I)

How the Mind Attends to Meaning

The proliferation of networked systems of nerve cells (i.e., nervous systems) with a central processing center (i.e., brains) that we see marking the “Cambrian explosion” (c. 530 million years ago) occasioned the emergence of a novel dimension of complexity and information processing. At this new level of “minded animals” (Mind), the PTB entity–field relationship is that of the animal–environment coupling, and with such animals we see the emergence of neurocognitive computation of meaningful information. Meaning becomes sensory, mobile, and, eventually, subjectively experiential.

The evolution of mobile bodies that could freely navigate the environment meant organisms could now learn in the sense more familiar to us—that is, by direct sensory engagement with the environment in real time. Before, at the level of Life, learning occurred only at the population (phylogenetic) level, as natural selection “updated” the species’ genetic code to better match environmental conditions. Meaning was passed down through genetic inheritance from generation to generation. It was embodied, but not experienced; reflexive, but not reflective. Memory was something in the genes, not in the head.

With the emergence of nervous systems, however, this changed. For one thing, it saw the evolution of heads! (Natural selection hit on the bilateral symmetry of the animal body plan, with the nervous system’s central processor, its brain, positioned in the anterior.) With brains, the updating of meaningful information could now take place at the individual (ontogenetic) level, as individual organisms could now revise their own internal models of the world based on sense inputs from their surroundings in real time.^[i] Such information could then be stored in individual cognitive memory akin to the way information had been stored as collective genetic memory. This meant that, in addition to the relatively slow pace of genetic adaptation, there could now be much quicker behavioral adaptation.^[ii]

All this entailed a massive upgrade for the universal learning process, allowing information of much greater complexity to be processed at much greater speed by evolving animals. It also entailed that animals develop increasingly sophisticated internal models of the world they inhabited. As Richard Dawkins has put it, “Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.”^[iii]

At the complexity level of Mind, animals learn to simulate the world with greater and greater reliability in their bid to reduce ignorance about the environment and remain far from equilibrium.