ActualBrains

Quora Answer : Is brain-like cognition an attractor in nature?

Aug 4, 2016

Very interesting question.

I suspect we don't have enough data for a full theory. To the best of my knowledge brains seem to have evolved with the spinal chord / central nervous system. So in chordates all brains probably have a common ancestor. A brief history of the brain

But maybe octopuses have a separate evolutionary story for their intelligence (Scientists say 'aliens' are already here - and they're living in the sea ) which might even include a kind of distributed intelligence as each tentacle seems to have its own control centre and autonomous decision making. (A kind of subsumption architecture).

The Portuguese man o' war is possibly the nearest thing we know to a "decentralized animal". It doesn't show much goal directed behaviour (it just drifts with the wind) and the tentacles just do local food collection.

But perhaps we could imagine that something like a man o'war could approach the condition of an octopus ... perhaps tentacles could do more than pull up food but actually coordinate some kind of oscillation that propels the colony in a particular direction in response to some stimulus generated by sensors in other parts of the colony.

The alternative to a brain would be that sensors produce signals that propagate through the whole organism and inspire some kind of reaction in it. I assume that's how plants do phototaxis.

So we could imagine our smart man o'war being able to track and home in on shoals of fish without having a brain.

But it's HARD to imagine that this could really compete with and outperform animals that DO have an architecture with centres that collate and redistribute information. My hunch is that this architectural differentiation would soon evolve ... with specialized "decision-making" cells / regions... much like Coase's "theory of the firm". At some point, centralized decision-making becomes cheaper than managing the transaction costs of fully decentralized decision-making.