I never really liked the theory of evolution all that much. Not because I don't consider monkeys to be my god-damned blood brothers, but because natural selection is just too fucking convenient as the primary force of evolution. There is, I have felt for a long time now, a unifying energy-based logic to all animal behaviors. They are not simply “Evolved” behaviors, which have, through the power of randomness and pure survival (the yet unknown and mysterious drive of meiosis and differentiation), yielded extremely complex (and counter-intuituve) behavior-patterns (see the baby sea turtle problem below). They are not random in any way. The resulting battles between desire-formation machines (like the (at least) two symbiotes living inside each one of our heads), intent on understanding the nature of electicity (their own and that of the outside world (their food)), which is, of course, The powering force of every animal, within a closed environment (like a skull), yields life (animals, plants, bacteria, viri, maybe). I like to think of the animal as a giant bag of parasites, successfully (more or less) surviving off of one another and deceiving one another to do it (we even have mites, arachnids, that live in our eyelids) If you think about it, any two things forced to live in the same closed environment with a limited amount of resources, will, by the definition of life, compete for resources with one another. Life is made up of many little battles, and the two desire-formation machines living inside our skulls compete for dominance like any other two systems. the fact that they are so similar (virtually identical at birth) only makes the battle that more intense. Desires, formed by these desire-formation machines, are groups of sensory data, organized situationally, with key representational information about energy usage and potential energy gain. I always felt like more of a Lamarkian, personally. I could never explain it. Natural selection is pretty fucking defeatist, if you think about it. You are as you are, but your next generation, oh your next generation-- it will be the the best parts of you AND your fuck buddy, so fear not. BORING. I change every day, my friends. Sometimes, I swear I can feel my brain growing (and shrinking), and with it, powerful changes in my approach to obtaining energy, pure electricity, in the most efficient way--my genetic code. Am I crazy? You better fucking believe it, but I do the best I can to explore my utter lack of sanity in as scientifically sound a way as possible. I do hope you'll listen.
It wasn't that many years ago, when they thought that post-childhood, the brain grew no new cells. seriously, guys? (Now they're rethinking how much DNA changes throughout the lifetime of a person) That's almost as terribile as how we approached the problem of modeling intelligence. First step, of course, being-- ignore the obvious external structure of the brain. The brain, my friends, is in TWO GENERAL PARTS, which are split right down the middle all the way through. yes, there are many parts to those parts, but it is this double core structure, which yields the miracle of life, the great battle--why it is extremely difficult for all animals above insects fail local minima/maxima problems on their progression through the game of life and why this is so fucking hard and confusing to model without expressing more of your own intelligence than anything related to the robot. why we cannot yet model intelligence that is even close to that of an insect.