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

common underlying theme of information. The scientific method is concerned with data almost by definition. But perhaps not so obvious is the fact that the progression of scientific thinking is an evolutionary process: a preexisting idea mutates unexpectedly into a profound new theory, which captures something deep about the world, and gathers popularity, but always in competition with an array of differing hypotheses. It will continue to survive only if the proponents of rival theories fail to explain the world more accurately or to convince the minds of the collective scientific community to bank on their ideas instead. In this way, various species of useful potential information about our universe may emerge, thrive, and eventually die out, as if they were real biological species.
    A more surprising notion is that all life is itself an implicit scientific enterprise, albeit one that cares only for information relevant to survival and reproduction, rather than anything whatsoever that is intriguing about the wider universe.
    Nature resembles science closely in its catalog of successes and failures to such an extent that, just as the first lesson in science is failure, so one could easily claim that the first lesson in nature is also failure. Of all the species that have ever existed, only about one in a thousand survive today. But much more than this, the whole mechanism for specifying the recipe for life is honed from natural experimentation to creatively store and refine a set of working hypotheses about the world.
    The main thesis of this book is that consciousness simply is a certain kind of processing of information, especially information that is useful, that captures some pattern to the world. This chapter will provide the context to this argument: Consciousness didn’t pop mysteriously out of the biological ether. Instead, it evolved, like almost everything else in nature, in an incremental way, and is intimately linked to the universal blind biological enterprise of accurately capturing useful ideas. Consequently, almost all features of evolutionary “learning” are mirrored in the computational details of the brain, and of the landscape of our conscious minds.

THE ESSENCE OF EVOLUTION
     
    The standard theory of evolution is beautiful in its simplicity: Over billions of years, from a single common ancestor, there arose all the millions of wildly differing life-forms that ever existed and that populate the earth today. Such variety occurs partly because there are limited resources, and creatures need to compete to grab the choicest morsels. Some organisms consume others, so competition can deteriorate into vicious battles, both within and between species. The traits that keep an organism alive and help it to breed will flourish, whereas features that hamper survival and successful reproduction will, over the generations, slowly disappear from the population. It is this shifting of traits within a population and across the generations that eventually creates new species.
    These traits are mainly determined by genes, individual instructions in the recipe for how to make an organism. A creature’s genes are copied to its offspring, which will therefore closely resemble its parent. But these recipe instructions can sometimes by chance get misspelled, potentially creating a new variety of traits with each successive generation. These misspellings are not like typos in books, which are always wrong. Instead, misspellings, or mutations, in the genetic code will sometimes be beneficial. And if sexual reproduction is involved, rather than simple self-replication, the resemblance across generations will be far from perfect, injecting even greater fluidity into the transformation of life over time.
    From this schematic of how all life evolved on this planet, there is a hidden agenda, namely, the blind “need” to accurately represent the relevant features of the world. This requirement is in some ways the essence of