p.144 The brain's task is to guide the body it controls through a world of shifting conditions and
sudden surprises, so it must gather information from that world and use it swiftly to "produce future" -
to extract anticipations in order to stay one step ahead of disaster... So the brain must represent temporal properties
of events in the world, and it must do this efficiently.
p.176 And one of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead,
to produce future as Paul Valery put it.
FRANCOIS JACOB (1982), p. 66
p.177 In order to cope, an organism must either armor itself (like a tree or clam) and
"hope for the best," or else develop methods of getting out of harm's way and into the better neighborhoods in its
vicinity. If you follow this latter course, you are confronted with the primordial problem that every agent
must continually solve:
Now what do I do?
In order to solve this problem, you need a nervous system, to control your activities in time and
space... The key to control is the ability to track or even anticipate the important features of the
environment, so all brains are, in essence, anticipation machines.
p.177-178 Even more primitive are the withdrawal and approach responses of the simplest organisms, and they
are tied in the most direct imaginable way to the sources of good and ill: they touch them. Then, depending on whether
the touched thing is bad or good for them, they either recoil or engulf (in the nick of time, if they are lucky). They do
this by simply being 'wired' so that actual contact with the good or bad feature of the world triggers the appropriate squirm...
At the minimalist extreme, then, we have the creatures who represent as little as possible: just enough to let
the world warn them sometimes when they are beginning to do something wrong. Creatures who follow this policy
engage in no planning... The next step involves short-range anticipation - for instance, the ability to duck incoming bricks.
This sort of anticipatory talent is often "wired in"
p.180-181 The psychologist Odmar Neumann (1990) suggests that orienting responses are the biological
counterpart to the shipboard alarm "All hands on deck!" Most animals, like us, have activities that they control
in a routine fashion, "on autopilot," using less than their full capacities, and in fact under the control of specialized
subsystems of their brains. When a specialized alarm is triggered... the animal's nervous system is mobilized to deal
with the possibility of an emergency... Neumann speculates that these orienting responses began as reactions to alarm
signals, but proved so useful in provoking a generalized update that animals began to go into the orienting mode more and
more frequently... One might say it became a habit, no longer just under the control of external stimuli, but internally
initiated (rather like regular fire drills).
Regular vigilance gradually turned into regular exploration, and a new behavioral strategy
began to evolve: the strategy of acquiring information "for its own sake," just in case it might prove valuable someday. Most
mammals were attracted to this strategy... they began to become what the psychologist George Miller has called informavores:
organisms hungry for further information about the world they inhabited [JLJ - guilty, as charged.]
p.222 when an organism faces a crisis (or just a difficult and novel problem), it may have resources in
it that would be very valuable in the circumstances if only it could find them and put them to use in time! Orienting
responses, as Odmar Neumann has surmised, have the valuable effect of more or less turning everybody on at
once, but accomplishing this global arousal, as we saw, is as much part of the problem as part of the solution...
the chaos soon settles, leaving one specialist temporarily in charge (and, perhaps, better informed by the competition
it has won)
p.257 In his book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988), the psychologist Bernard
Baars summarizes what he sees as a "gathering consensus" that consciousness is accomplished by a "distributed
society of specialists that is equipped with a working memory, called a global workspace, whose contents can be broadcast
to the system as a whole" (p. 42).
