2 ms·

How . . . did something like the brain evolve from the primordial soup?

• edgyquant 5y ago
  4 billion years of iteration gets you a long way.
• buryat 5y ago
  you get a lot of atomic hydrogen and given enough time
• tsimionescu 5y ago
  Well, some functions that the brain performs in higher animals are present even in single-celled bacteria (sensing, decision making), so it's not that hard to imagine a path from a generalized capacity for computation to a cell that is more and more specialized in this, and also to an entire tissue achieving the same. In the end, it's not harder to imagine than muscles or intestine lining or blood evolving.
• Comevius 5y ago
  It's physics. Any system responding to a stochastic driving system can be considered computing. In fact any system that retains information about past environmental fluctuations must have information that is predictive of future ones for the system to be thermodynamically efficient. https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 This physics creates complexity. It selects for increasingly complex thermodynamically efficient structures with predictive power. Stars die, they become entropy, but until they run out of fuel they drive the creation of localized complexity maxima.