This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.
The Mouth and the Brain
A couple of further thoughts about the brain. The most important organ for the brain is the mouth. Living things, first of all, eat. Then they grow, then they have sex, then they die. Some don't even have sex. They just clone.
The brain evolved as a decision maker related to sensory input from the mouth. It was an advantage to process some information about what was in your mouth so that you could either swallow it, or spit it out.
That's why in living creatures the mouth is very close to the brain. In some primitive creates the oesophagus goes right through the brain. The sense of smell is an extension of the mouth. It has nothing to do with breathing, except that it can detect the worthiness of things based on airborne particles. Worthiness for eating, worthiness for having sex with.
Then we have the eyes. They evolved eight separate times in different ways (that we know of). They are very useful. They can help determine whether something is good to eat or have sex with before it gets into your mouth. However the mouth still rules. If you were tricked by the appearance, and it tastes bad, you spit it out.
Eyes are also close to the brain. In fact the closest you can get to the brain is the optic nerve. It is really part of the brain. As is the whole of the nervous system, in a more or less remote sense.
With eyes, ears (cunningly very close to the brain) nose and mouth combined with the sense of touch, you have a pretty good mind/body gestalt. If the brain has another couple of excellent things in Its kit, being (a) inherited tendencies (such as personal hygiene) and (b) memory, if gives you a good jump on things that aren't so well endowed.
With these endowments you can make representations. Then you can compare those representations with experience. You can then develop and test scenarios, which leads to reasoning intelligence and imagination.
This then leads to representations being codified In the physical world, by means of language, in texts and pictures.
Does this lead us to believe that the mind / body / computer gestalt is as system in the same sense as the mind body? Perhaps not. The mind is there to serve the body, not the other way round.
The question is whether or not tools are part of the being or not. A pair of secateurs is not part of me, it is part of the not-me, the world that I am manipulating.
So what happens when we have personal computer implants that organically grow as we do, providing access to say, the internet, a means of data storage, search functions, processing.
Manifestations of life, such as culture, are part of life. They do not exist independently so they are part of a big system and tend to evolve. Thus we have technological evolution. In some senses AI is therefore inevitable, but it will have no driving force until computers get mouths.
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