X PREFACETh e construction of a genuine biological model of intelligence, and of
a new vision of potential, starts in chapter 4. It goes right back to basics:
to molecular networks, and life before genes; to evolution and cells; the
true nature of complex environments; the kind of information living
things really need to survive in them; and the “intelligent systems” that
use it. It also explains why the new concepts of “dynamical systems” are
needed to understand them. It will be, for most readers, the most chal-
lenging chapter, but is crucial to the reconstruction that follows. Th ere are
a number of summaries, though; and some of the more complex parts
can be skipped, anyway.
Chapter 5 applies these ideas to the explanation of development: the
transformation of an original “speck ” of matter into bodies and brains of
dazzling variety and competencies, utilizing the same genome. It starts
to tell us how potential and variation are actively created through the
system dynamics, rather than passively received in genes. A dynamical,
“intelligent” physiology, coordinating activities in disparate tissues, also
has much to tell us about the nature of individual diff erences.
Chapters 4 and 5 begin to show how intelligent systems have evolved
at many diff er ent levels, corresponding with more changeable environ-
ments. Chapter 6 describes how a “neural” system of intelligence emerged
as more changeable environments were encountered. It contrasts the
traditional mechanical and computational meta phors of brain func-
tions with the emerging concepts of dynamical pro cesses. Only the latter
can deal with unpredictable environments, and I will show how brains
based on dynamical pro cesses are— even in nonhuman animals— far clev-
erer than we think.
Scientists’ views of brain functions, though, have been much informed
by models of cognition. In chapter 7, I summarize these models, show
their inadequacies, and off er the new perspective now emerging in dy-
namical systems research. For the fi rst time, that perspective clearly de-
scribes how cognitive intelligence both transcends, yet emerges from, that
in brain networks.
Chapter 8 puts cognition in the context of the evolution of social
groupings from ants to apes. Even in ants, it has entailed a further leap of
intelligent functions, between brains, which is even more complex than
those within them (I call it “epicognition”). And that, in turn, sheds new
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