Pink Monkey Farm: The Blog

What the brain is for

Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling.

No.

Brains bring forth phenomenal worlds.

They do so, somehow, by enriching the mapping between what we see as meaningful energy gradients at a receptor surface and finely attuned response at the motor side. This is stimulus/response. But nervous systems enhance this. They make it more complex. As you move up the value chain, from hydra to human, the mediation of the response to the meaningful energy gradient is magnified, producing vast worlds of complexity that then appear to be at some remove from the very direct push and pull of the information gradient and the action. This is what it is to bring forth a phenomenal world. We create them. So this tells us something about what we are.