Selection processes in living systems: Role in cognitive construction and recovery from brain damage

The most fundamental assumptions on which this paper is based are the importance of the concept of organization and the need to seek reasons for instances of organization while avoiding accidental, implicit appeals to homunculi. In the manner of Ashby, Campbell, and other general systems theorists, the concept of selection is seen as the only alternative, a way of explaining the behavior of complex systems whose properties are manifest only when their parts interact without seeking these properties, homunculi, self‐contained in the parts. As every new adaptation of a living system obviously does not wait to evolve anew from a primordial substrate, we may think of these systems as having developed an internal ecology of vicarious selectors within which new adaptations can be worked out, remote from environmental exigencies. There are both logical and empirical reasons for supposing that these structures, the determinants of varied adaptive behaviors, show self‐maintenance properties involving functional autonomy and spontaneous activity. In individual organisms they range from very global, motivational and emotional programs, operating mainly via elicitation of behavioral tendencies and selection by reinforcement of behaviors, to well articulated skills suited to very specific stimulus inputs. It is proposed that these considerations are relevant to the understanding of stimulus seeking, including humor, imprinting, and the similarities between perception and thinking. The phenomenon of recovery from brain damage is then discussed at some length. It is reasoned that evolution of the brain, ongoing maintenance of order in the brain, and recovery must depend on selection processes rather than on homunculi and that the concept of functional projection provides a more explicit, useful alternative to those of localization, redundancy, and distribution of function in the brain.