Constant Reconstruction for Adaptation | 2min snip from Dr. John Vervaeke

Consciousness, Intelligence, and the Quest for Meaning with Vervaeke, Henriques, Levin, and McSweeny

Dr. John Vervaeke

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Constant Reconstruction for Adaptation

Memories are not stored indefinitely in the brain, but constantly reconstructed to make them relevant in new situations. Across scales, this process ensures the maintenance of a coherent self-model. Evolution has ingrained this adaptability by anticipating change and promoting immediate adaptation to new circumstances, leading to the creation of problem-solving agents within biological systems.

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When you're 90, you will still have memories of your childhood, but not because you've kept the, there is no molecular structure in the brain that stays the same for that period of time and everything's bubbling around, molecules come in and out cells and so on. What you are constantly doing is reconstructing yourself and your memories to make them applicable in the new scenario. So what does this look like across scales? For the human, it just means that as things in your brain and body go in and out, you are maintaining a coherent self model of some sort. In evolutionary terms, it means that evolution long before we had brains or any of that doubled down on this idea that everything is going to change. You know the environment is going to change, your parts are going to change because you will be mutated. We know you're going to change. And so this is why we have these amazing examples of, you know, when we make tadpoles with an eye on its butt instead of in its head, they don't need new generations of adaptation. They can see and they can learn and visualize these immediately, right? There are many, I write about this stuff a lot. There are many amazing situations where you can radically change the, not just the environment, but actually the parts themselves. You can put in weird nanomaterials and then all the stuff. You always get something coherent because I think because what biology does is assumes that you can't just learn the structure of the past. You have to make problem solving agents and the body and then eventually the brain and

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