Sensors are at first sensitive to only one stimulus. If the sensitivity helped its cell, it would be retained by the species; if not it would be not be retained. Eventually, sensors would become potentially sensitive to more and more stimuli, to hurry the process of finding effective sensitivities. Sensors always sensitive to a wide vairety of stimuli would not be effective until they were able to limit their sensitivity to the first stimulus they are exposed to. This would also keep the cell up-to-date–no longer would they automatically have sensitivities to other species that had become extinct or to matter in an enivronment no longer present.
Okay, now comes the detachment of such sensors before being sensitized to given stimuli. They might not be able to admit neuro-signals then, in which case they would be innocuous accidental superfluous intruders that could well persist–until they became sensitive to neuro-signals. At that point, they would become “sensor-sensors.”
Once able to become active, they would emit neuro-signals that would turn on effectors, sometimes, beneficially, sometimes not, sometimes neither. Once an inhibitor joined one of them to make a proto-retroceptual reflex, their cell could inhibit them from activating effectors they should not.
To go back to my earlier remarks: “Another step in the evolution of superior intelligence will be the advent of inhibitors and stimulators–and we know inhibition and stimulation have major roles in the nervous system. An inhibitor is device which prevents any effector it is connected to from acting in the same manner that a sensor causes the activation of any effector it is connected to. Like everything else, it would pop up by chance but persist when it happened to be connected to a prey-odor sensor, say, and inhibited an away-from effector. Ergo, the alphazoa blessed with such an inhibitor would not flee a cell whose predator color it had an avoidance reflex for if the cell had a prey odor, but appropriately flee a cell that had the color of a predator but no prey odor.
Eventually, effectors would evolve capable of causing two actions, or a sensor similarly capable. Hence, an effector connected to a sensor sensitive to prey odor might both inhibit withdrawel from a cell with a predator’s color and cause advance toward a cell with the odor of prey. Or a sensor sensitive to prey odor connect to two effectors, one inhibiting withddrawel, one causing advance.
“So, life will now have achieved the ability to choose between advancing or withdrawing in the direction of a gray cell, and be on its way toward more complex actions. It will still be a very primitive computer, but with something like intelligence, anyway.” The alphazoan could now, in effect, remember encountering a certain stimulus, what resulted, and whether or not the outcome was beneficial.
Something else is likely to have happened: various effectors sensitive to all neuro-signals from endo-sensors becoming constantly manufactured while inhibited ones are destroyed. This would allow the cell constantly to find effective new ways to deal with existence. Only effective reflexes consisting of endo-sensors and effectors would keep alive, and the latter would become more sophisticated in what signals they accepted, for they’d be able to accept lots of difference signals so long as what action they contributed to was pleasurable. Stimulators would increase this.
The number of sensor-sensors would increase, as well. The truest form of memory would occur once one sensor-sensor conected to another. You would then have a memory of, say, stimulus A followed by a memory of stimulus B. If cellular activity (call it activity C) as sensor-sensor B becomes active is positive, then when stimulus A again leads to sensor A’s activation, Sensor A would activate sensor B–even it no stimulus B was then present. AB would then, through memory, try to cause activity C and possibly succeed.
More complex arrangements would then have to evolve. Memory-holders, as I will now call sensor-sensors, would become sensitive to much, then all, “information” transmitted during an “instacon,” or unit of consciousness They would retain the “information” until having some threshold amount needed for activation–which might come to be variable, dependent of what’s going on in the cell as a whole. Longer strands of connected memory-holders would come into being. Effectors would gain variable amounts of neuro-signals, often from more than one memory-cell (and no long directly from a sensor), and need a certain minimal amount to become active. At some point, too, multi-cellular organisms would evolve or have evolved, relatively soon devoting whole cells to carry out the functions I’ve been giving to organelles.
Consequently, my next step in modeling the evolution of intelligence is going to concern the development of the mnemoducts my theory hypothesizes, as the central organs of memory, and intelligence. I am taking a break from the project now, however, because of other projects higher on my present list of priorities.
