Those who are trying to improve such systems have long wondered: what is the secret of human general intelligence? In this post I want to consider we can learn about this from fact that the brain evolved. How would an evolved brain be general? if we are looking to explain a surprising generality, flexibility, and rapid evolution in human brains, it makes sense to consider the possibility that human brain design took a different path, one more like that of single-celled metabolism. That is, 1 straightforward way to design a general evolvable brain is to use an extra large toolbox of mental modules that can be connected together in many different ways. While each tool might be a carefully constructed jewel, the whole set of tools would have less of an overall structure. Like a pile of logical gates that can be connected many ways, or metabolism sub-networks that can be connected together into many networks. In this case, the secret to general evolvable intelligence would be less in the particular tools and more in having an extra large set of tools, plus some simple general ways to search in the space of tool combinations. A tool set so large that the brain can do most tasks in a great many different ways.

2023-03-25: Intelligence is modular and extremely prevalent, for generous definitions of intelligence

One implication of this hierarchy of homeostatically stable, nested modules is that organisms became much more flexible while still maintaining a coherent ‘self’ in a hostile world. Evolution didn’t have to tweak everything at once in response to a new threat, because biological subunits were primed to find novel ways of compensating for changes and functioning within altered systems. For example, in planarian flatworms, which reliably regenerate every part of the body, using drugs to shift the bioelectrically stored pattern memory results in two-headed worms. Remarkably, fragments of these worms continue to regenerate two heads in perpetuity, without editing the genome. Moreover, flatworms can be induced, by brief modulation of the bioelectric circuit, to regrow heads with shape (and brain structure) appropriate to other known species of flatworms (at about 100 million years of evolutionary distance), despite their wild-type genome.

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