Brains and Tools

What is the sequence of events that produced biological neural networks and ultimately brains?

How is it possible for an assembly of molecules interacting with energy to develop emergent properties like consciousness, self-awareness, and free will? Or is there more to the story?

How did brains gain control over multicellular organisms? How did brains develop tools to extend their powers to sense and control their environment? How is this process leading to artificial neural networks with ever growing powers?

 

Brains and Tools

Brains and tools involve the composition, structure, and evolution of neurons and biological and artificial neural networks from the simplest animals to the human brain, their ability to process sensory input and to control motor functions, and the development of tools to analyze, observe, and control the environment and transform the Earth and its lifeforms. A reverse order logarithmic timeline covers the evolutionary history of brains and tools from 3.4 billion year old bacterial membrane proteins that controlled the flow of ions to two billion year old eukaryote cells that generated electrical signals to 600 million year neural networks to complex animal brains to modern machines with exceptional computational powers.

"Prove you're not a robot" - lecture on artificial intelligence, consciousness, and free will

Dr. Bob Field presented a research scholar's talk on November 1, 2016 entitled "Prove you're not a robot". The description of the talk is as follows: Our planet and our species evolved from elements  that were formed in and dispersed by supernovas. Now our fate depends on rapid advances in robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. Where are we going, physically, mentally, and spiritually? Do you have free will? Can robots have free will? The 25 chart RUA Robot PowerPoint slide lecture can be downloaded.

A 30 minute narrated video of the lecture is embedded below. When you play the video, you can go to full screen and adjust the setting to 720 HD. Be prepared to turn the sound volume down when the Big Bang and Sophia Robot video clips play.The author's narration is a bit muffled and monotonic due to the quality of the laptop microphone. If you have any trouble with the embedded video, go to https://youtu.be/Kg6DUOchftc.

 

 

 

 

rotating brain animation

rotating brain animation gif http://askabiologist.asu.edu/sites/default/files/resources/articles/nervous_journey/Four_lobes_brain_animation_200.gif

 

 

Brains like these developed tools like Mathcad which feature animations including the one below of amplitude modulated and frequency modulated cosine curves.

 

 

Jabiru in flight on river heading toward Mayan ruins at Lamanai in Belize in December 2018

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Related Content

Brains and Tools

What is the sequence of events that produced biological neural networks and ultimately brains?

How is it possible for an assembly of molecules interacting with energy to develop emergent properties like consciousness, self-awareness, and free will? Or is there more to the story?

How did brains gain control over multicellular organisms? How did brains develop tools to extend their powers to sense and control their environment? How is this process leading to artificial neural networks with ever growing powers?