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“When a philosopher happens to read some of his older texts, and most of the time he shakes his head in disapproval, he can be sure that he is on the right path. For this is an infallible sign that his thought has evolved and that he possesses the capacity to learn, to unlearn, to adapt. He is brave enough to acknowledge that he may have been naive, and this, at the same time, is a useful reminder that he might be wrong even with his current views. Thus, he protects himself against arrogance and intransigence.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“As also noted by Morris, empirical data from various lineages of fish and amphibians have shown, for instance, that more plastic clades tend to be more
speciose than sister taxa of similar age but with less plasticity, due to a combination of greater opportunities to diversify and augmented evolvability of plastic features and thus of decreased risk of extinction. In addition, empirical studies show that
even populations that derive from ancestors that were particularly overspecialized for a certain, very specific way of life, including parasitism, have successfully
changed their behavior by becoming non-parasitic and displaying a morphology that is substantially different from that of their ancestors as seen for example in
lamprey evolution. Morris argued that random variations arising in a population may decrease plasticity and that the plastically changed phenotype
linked with the behavioral shift may be negatively affected. Therefore, these variants will be likely eliminated by selection, whereas variants that decrease plasticity in the direction of the plastic change will tend to be selected and spread through the population. This may lead to a situation in which the phenotype might appear similar across generations, but its plasticity is actually increasingly reduced until an environmental shift will no longer provoke phenotypic changes. As noted by Morris, Baldwin allowed for other non-mutually exclusive scenarios to occur, such as the rise of variants that increase plasticity in general, thus increasing the ‘fit�
between organisms and their environment and the degree to which evolution could be directed, thus leading to evolutionary trends.”
― Rui Diogo, Evolution Driven by Organismal Behavior: A Unifying View of Life, Function, Form, Mismatches and Trends

“The realization that the brain used so many different kind of chemicals, in addition to classical neurotransmitters, to communicate beween neurons was just the first step in a major conceptual shift in neuroscience. Many of these substances are neuropeptides, and most of those affect mood and behavior. The specificity of their effects resides not in the anatomical connectivity between neurons, but in the distribution of receptors within the brain. Different receptors have very different patterns of distribution, and the distributions differ between species in ways that correlate with differences in behavior.
The mere fact of a receptor-peptide mismatch in a particular brain area might have no great importance. It might be that many cells are promiscuous in the receptors that they express: If some receptors see no ligand, the cost to the cells is negligible. Profligate receptor expression might contribute to the evolvability of neural systems, and might be common because organisms with a liberal attitude to receptor expression are those most likely to acquire novels functions. Because extrasynaptic signaling does not require precise point-to-point connectivity, it is intrinsically 'evolvable': a minor mutation in the regulatory region of a peptide receptor gene, by altering the expression pattern, could have functional consequences without any need for anatomical rewiring.
That peptide receptors have distinctive patterns of expression, and that peptides produce coherent behavioral effects when given quite crudely into the brain, suggests that volume transmission is used as a signaling mechanism by many different populations of peptidergic neurons. We thus must see neuropeptides as 'hormones of the brain'.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“A neuron in the human brain can never equate the human mind, but this analogy doesn't hold true for a digital mind, by virtue of its mathematical structure, it may â€� through evolutionary progression and provided there are no insurmountable evolvability constraints â€� transcend to the higher-order Syntellect. A mind is a web of patterns fully integrated as a coherent intelligent system; it is a self-generating, self-reflective, self-governing network of sentient components (that are themselves minds) that evolves, as a rule, by propagating through dimensionality and ascension to ever-higher hierarchical levels of emergent complexity. In this book, the Syntellect emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, developmental stage for the human mind â€� becoming one global mind â€� that would constitute quintessence of the looming Cybernetic Singularity.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution