Last week we talked about sentience. The ability for an organism
to feel, to direct it’s attention towards a thing and thus
improve it’s neural model of that thing. This works in ways
which are far too complicated for science to have yet explained.
However, we do know more or less how neurons in the brain work,
and can postulate that this system for filtering information,
categorising it, directing attention to parts of it, attaching
emotional significance to it and learning to operate in the
world is built from some kind of neural network in the brain. It
seems likely that in a sufficiently advanced organism (and right
now we basically have no way of determining how ‘advanced’ we
mean) these neural circuits can do more than just focus
awareness on the senses, more than just learn to trigger
emotions and moods through association. It can also grow
connections from part of it’s own network back into the ‘input’
parts of that network. By directing it’s attention not at the
world, at it’s senses, but back at it’