The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor

infinitum (perhaps by a strong chemical bond to the rock wall). When this particular volcanic vent becomes dormant, she degrades; she doesn’t make a single copy. Beth’s chemical components, instead, hold within them the “idea” that resources can potentially be found in multiple locations (perhaps by a chemical bond to the rock wall that weakens without sufficient heat, but strengthens again when another heated rock is chanced upon). When this particular vent becomes dormant, the lack of heat means she detaches herself from the rock and floats randomly until she’s jostled against another hot rock, which allows for a chemical reaction to bond her to the rock surface. She is again close to heat and other useful resources, allowing her to make some copies of herself. But when this rock, too, becomes dormant, and there is no other vent nearby, she degrades. In a sense, Beth’s structure is molding itself more closely than Alice’s to the external data concerning where resources can be found—instead of the chemical equivalent of a belief that Alice holds that “this location is all that matters,” Beth’s concept is that any hot rock will do. Claire has a physical structure that reflects the information that heat equals resources, regardless of location (by chemically sensing and gravitating toward the nearest heat source—behavior probably too sophisticated for non-life). So Claire has a chemical form that most accurately shapes itself to the information about her requirements for heat energy, as well as how in the world to find this, and this gives her—and her similar offspring—a distinct advantage. She follows Beth to the second vent, but when this vent fails and Beth degrades, Claire directionally moves toward the next nearest heat source. Over time, in response to these dangerously intermittent vents, Claire-forms will be the only population that survives.

LIVING ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS
     
    While Claire’s more sophisticated, accurate “idea” would have caused her to be the dominant pseudo-life creature in her world, an even more successful way of responding to a changing environment is to update your ideas about it. Making true copies of yourself is important, but with such a dynamic world, where superior rivals or new dangers might emerge at any moment, being too fixed in your representations is dangerous. In this situation, exact copies of the originally superior chemical look doomed by their antiquated inflexibility. So some mechanism that can actually inject new creative ideas—in other words, that can “learn”—could potentially be very advantageous.
    At this primordial stage, on the cusp of life, changing “beliefs” simply means making nonidentical copies. In other words, a family of proto-creatures needs to maintain a healthy balance between keeping useful knowledge and accepting that their world-picture could be better; they want their offspring to be faithful copies of themselves, but not too faithful. This loosening of the fidelity of the information is potentially expensive, because by chance many offspring will be inferior, perhaps just disintegrating at birth, or in other ways missing some vital chemical detail that enhances the chances of survival or replication. But it also raises the opportunity for some of the next generation to be an improvement on the model.
    This tension between maintaining beliefs and injecting new ideas is a profound issue for any complex information-processing system, be it proto–life-forms, the neural interactions in our brains, or the scientific enterprise as a whole. Usually, though, a Goldilocks middle state, with chaos on one side and utter stability on the other, is the optimal way for any system to process information, and especially to learn useful new details about the world. This semi-chaotic activity is found whenever efficient information processing is required. It is probably the default state for networks of neurons, and it is one