The human brain is the showpiece of meme and gene evolution because they evolved hand in hand. As more memes accumulated, offering survival advantages, there was a filtering of the reproductive memes encoding the brains architecture (i.e the genes), leaving room for an expansion in the size of the brain and an increase in its capacity to store, process and communicate memes. That feedback loop caused the rapid evolution of the hardware we have today.
We know that the brain consists of neurons connected to each other through axons to synapses located on the dendrites of other neurons. Through these synaptic connections these neurons communicate chemical signals to each other using neurotransmitters. But what allows the brain to be conscious? No one knows exactly.
My perspective on it is that each neuron can be part of multiple virtual organisms (or agents). Each agent has goals much like an ant in a swarm of ants. For example the agent might latch on to a chemical signal and pursue it to get a stronger signal, much as driver ants swarm blindly down a chemical trail, reinforcing it as they go. All of the agents together create an ecosystem for individual connected agents to provide the cues that prompt the agent to act in certain ways. This ecosystem could be seen as containing virtual food, signals or virtual comfort levels much like what swarming creatures such as ants react to.
Some of the agents have many neurons as members and have a mouse-like intelligence unto themselves. While they have no clue that they are part of a brain they respond to their environment intelligently, pursuing their virtual food and virtual comfort. They can learn as neural networks are capable of learning by acting and seeing what feedback comes back from the virtual ecosystem
This line of thought reminds me of Minsky's Society of Mind (1980).
In fetal and infant humans, agents compete for resources and undergo a process of biological evolution. Agents that can't find virtual food and virtual comfort in the virtual ecosystem actually die, and their neurons and synapses can actually physically die too if they are not used in any successful agents. This is a natural part of the development of the human brain, and is crucial to development because the brain is an energy hog and a difficult organ to keep cool and oxygenated. Elsewhere I hypothesize that it might be important for resources to be relatively scant during early brain development so that there is a better chance of unneeded neurons and connections being killed off.
The hypothesis here is that an overabundance of agents could be a crucial link in the cause-effect chain of Autism.
Autism might be a disease where the natural pruning of connections doesn't happen fast enough leading to far too many agents competing for resources in the virtual ecosystem. In another post, I speculate that it might simply be the nutritious food and calories that mothers and infants get that create an over-abundance of resources in the virtual ecosystem and prevent agents from dying out as they should. Liken this to the toxic blooms that happen from the runoff from farms. That is one possible explanation.
Another compatible explanation that I have not explored in depth as of yet, is that the rich media and complex, fast-paced society that infants are exposed to causes agents that should otherwise die to live on. For decades parents have been suspicious of the effects of TV and other media upon their babies and sometimes strive to restrict it, yet with the advent of personal computing and smart phones, screens are everywhere. An actual measurement of this super-sophistication that babies are being born into is the rise in IQs for each generation.
We know that the hardware of the brain is unable to evolve significantly in the space of a few decades, so how could IQs be going up so dramatically every generation?
What must be going on is a the stimulus from all the media and the increasing pace of society is causing the agents to diversify and increase in number so that they can deal with this greater level of complexity. This allows more agents and their constituent neurons and synapses to survive and avoid the critical pruning out process. However, since this level of sophistication is relatively unnatural from a hunter-gatherer point of view, some infants' brain development goes awry, and the result is Autism. It is not incompatible with my other hypothesis: the Rich Diet Autism Hypothesis.
