3 breakthroughs led to the evolution of the mind:
1) Natural selection
2) Representation plus computation
3) Directed abstract thinking
| Paragraph | Summary |
| Of the four | Directed abstract thinking made humans exponentially more competitive and gave us unlimited access to the world of imagination |
| The mind | Life began with these precursors arising in a stable location: carbon fixation, power source, RNA world, lipid bubble enclosures (~4 billion years ago) |
| From this | These precursors were enough to initiate and support the evolution of single cell life, and eventually LUCA (last universal common ancestor) (~3.5 billion years ago). Multicellular life and sexual reproduction followed. (~1 billion years ago) |
| Larger multicellular | The value of predictive feedback leads to evolution of brains to provide centralized control of the body (~550 million years ago) |
| For the most | I am going to analyze brain function from the top down logically instead of mechanistically from the bottom up. |
| To control | Animals know in advance where the food will be and move their bodies toward it, but how? |
| The brain operates | Brains collect information from their environment and compute what they should do next |
| At every | The centralized brain must coordinate the body using a single-stream step selector (SSSS) to produce a chain of actions that accomplish goals |
| While we | Animals use consciousness to reason, which is a more flexible approach to control than learned behavior |
| Brains use | The brain uses massive parallel processing for sensing, memory and motor control |
| The SSSS | The SSSS and our entire reasoning capacity is serial but multitasks, though our primary task dominates our awareness |
| Why wouldn’t | Minds uses serial processing to facilitate prioritization and because it works pretty well |
| The brain controls | Brains use association-based and decision-based strategies, but association-based strategies don’t need consciousness or what we think of as intelligence |
| Reasoning is | Reasoning uses both kinds of strategies, but the decision-based ones predominate and include deduction and induction. The mind distinguishes the environment into a objects and reasons with them. |
| We experience | The SSSS as the center of conscious awareness, making us a program running in the brain. Consciousness feels the way it does so that important information grabs our attention. |