Or not.
Harry Jerison in his 1991 book Brain Size and the Evolution of Mind, at p. 89 has:
Mind is a necessary brain adaptation that organizes otherwise unmanageable amounts of neural information into a representation of the external world.
Is Jerison right?
Neurons are not the best level of abstraction when speaking of mind. You don't talk about myocytes when you discuss about soccer. Concepts, symbols, and the various types of interactions between them, are more appropriate building blocks of mind.
Regards,
Joachim
Trying to judge the validity of single statement apart from the larger context or work it occurs in is risky. Nonetheless, the above quote seems to relate to the evolutionary purpose of the mind, rather than providing a formal definition of what the mind is. The why rather than the what, respectively.
The "mind" can be conceptualized in a variety of ways, but from the evolutionary perspective the author is writing from, neuron/neural systems is the appropriate level of analysis - and the quote is quite on point. Concepts and symbols are not passed on by evolutionary mechanisms, only genes are - in this case, genes that code for the physiological structure of the brain and nervous system. So, to answer the question of how/why the mind evolved, we can't start with abstract concepts and higher-order cognition (i.e., thinking, reasoning, judgment, decision-making), we have to begin with the raw materials of evolution and build our way up to these.
As mentioned above, the mind can be conceptualized in a variety of ways, and the functionalism approach established by William James fits best within an evolutionary framework. In this view, the mind refers to a collection of functions. These functions (e.g., attention, perception, memory, language, etc,) evolved in organisms as adaptations to their environment for the purpose of survival and reproduction. In short, the mind is not an accident - it evolved for a purpose. Some old-school cognitive psychologists are of the opinion that evolutionary accounts of the mind are meaningless. "Knowing how the mind evolved is irrelevant to the question of how the mind works". I couldn't disagree more. When faced with a highly complex, unfamiliar machine you'll gain a much better understanding of how it works if you understand what it was designed to do.
I would like to stress some ideas underpinning the quote. First, in regard to the external world issue, Harvey Silver states that intelligence is not derived from the mind but from the social interaction with other people in the external world. Another notion may be plasticity, where information can be stored, retrieved and formed through 'wiring' and 'rewiring' in the neural system. Consequently, retrieval of exactly the same information involves different rewiring. Honest to say, since I am working in the same area of research, I have had to go back to Plato to understand how representation takes place and how perception happens about the external world. My work and studies on translation suggest that every translation instance is highly dependent on how we perceive messages as they are made in the environment.
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