Forgive me if I am being obtusely stupid here but if in your
'modelling procedure' you are going to evolve the brain from a single
or low-number cellular organism then your evolutionary 'protocols' or
'rules' will either be based at the cellular or subcellular (perhaps)
genetic level? Further you say that to avoid the nullifying
complication of having to know all the environmental variables since
that time billions of years ago to now, you are going to 'aim' the
evolution model at the current brain. Now as I see it this raises
three problems:
Firstly - How do you direct evolution? The whole essence of the
modelling is to understand how chaotic/random variation led to the
present state, aiming it means you eliminate the ability to gain
knowledge about this.
Secondly if you are going to model at a cellular or sub-cellular
level, then you will need aiming information of the same resolution,
which means you would have to know how the brain works at the cellular
or even subcellular level before you started, rendering the project
pointless as you would have already achieved what you want.
Thirdly - You seem to want to understand aspects of cognitive function
through this modelling procedure, but you are modelling at the
cellular level. Even if you could artifically evolve a brain, why do
you assume that would give you any insight into how it gives rise to
mind? Why do you assume that the reasonably arbitrary distinctions we
make of our mental function map in anyway isomorphically to functional
mechanisms within the brain? Evolution works at the genetic level,
even if you modelled all the innumberable mutations since single cell
organisms to the human genome, why would that give you any idea of how
the brain works? We have the genome now, it doesn't explain the
brain.
Shorten your posts.