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The Cerebral Code (Calvin, 1996)
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William H. Calvin

Thinking Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds, starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, but evolving into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile intelligence.

As Piaget emphasized in 1929, intelligence is what we use when we don't know what to do, when we have to grope rather than using a standard response. Calvin tackles a mechanism for doing this exploration and improvement offline, as we think before we act or practice the art of good guessing. Surprisingly, the subtitle's mosaics of the mind is not a literary metaphor. For the first time, it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be an appropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena, that of hexagonal mosaics of electrical activity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain. This two-dimensional mosaic is predicted to grow and dissolve much as the sugar crystals do in the bottom of a supersaturated glass of iced tea.

p.1 This is a book about thought, memory, creativity, consciousness, narrative, talking to oneself, and even dreaming... This book proposes how darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape up mental images.

p.1 As Piaget emphasized, intelligence is what we use when we don't know what to do, when we grope rather than using a standard response.

p.4 darwinian processes have been thought to be a possible basis for mental processes... They're a way to explore a Piagetian maze, where you don't initially know what to do... something creative is often needed when deciding what to do next - as when you pose a question.

p.5 As Wittgenstein once observed, you gain insights mostly through new arrangements of things you already know, not by acquiring new data.

p.7 Some readers have noticed by now that this book is not like my previous ones. They were for general readers [JLJ - nice way of confirming that this book is almost unreadable.]

p.18 Memes are those things that are copied from mind to mind... The cultural analog to the gene is the meme... it's the unit of copying.

p.21 I can identify six essential aspects of the creative darwinian process that bootstraps quality.

 1. There must be a reasonable complex pattern involved.
 2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern).
 3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance.
 4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space...
 5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment...
 6. ...new variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns.

p.23 At least five other factors are known to be important to the evolution of species. The creative darwinian process will run without them, but they affect the stability of its outcome, or the rate of evolution...

 7. Stability may occur, as in getting stuck in a rut...
 8. Systematic recombination generates many more variants than do copying errors...
 9. Fluctuating environments... [shape] up more complex patterns capable of doing well in several environments...
 10. Parcellation, as when rising sea level converts the hilltops of one island into an archipelago of small islands, typically speeds evolution...
 11. Local extinctions... speed evolution because they create empty niches.

p.53 New functions usually get a big head start, making part-time use of an organ that, in the past, has been under natural selection for some other, and often quite different function.

p.98 What makes the wasp's behavior more like that of a computer than an architect is the lack of any comprehension of the goal. Instead, the insect focuses on a series of immediate tasks. This distinction between "local" tasks, which could be accomplished by innate programming alone, and "global" goals, which may require a more complete perspective and understanding of the need a behavior serves, will be crucial to our analysis of more complex behavior. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, 1994

p.111 the brain is a jack-in-the-box, filled to the brim with spring-loaded plans of action. As such it is the very wellspring of all behavior. These brain-mind behavior programs, like sensory representations, are virtual - and they have been called "fictive" to capture their promissory aspect - but they are no less real. In our being and becoming, they are us and we are they. J. Allan Hobson, 1994

p.114 A thing "is" whatever it gives us least trouble to think it is. There is no other "is" than this. Samuel Butler (II)

p.129 Symbolic information is interpreted because we refuse to accept that any input is meaningless. Shown an inkblot, we see bats, witches and dragons. This refusal to accept that input is noise lies at the root of divination by tarot cards, tea leaves, the livers and shoulder blades of animals, or the sticks of the I Ching. John Maynard Smith, 1993

p.181 [J. B. S. Haldane] "the four stages of acceptance of a scientific theory: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so." [JLJ - note to self: need to work at transition of current paper from stage (i) to (ii) as primary goal.]

p.183 The proper, unique, and perpetual object of thought: that which does not exist, that which is not before me, that which was, that which will be, that which is possible, that which is impossible. Paul Valery