The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

Further complicating the picture was the simultaneous emergence of a sense of touch, which quickly fell into a complementary balance with an evolving sense of vision. Mirroring those early flickers of light sensitivity, nascent nerve endings swept across the surfaces of primitive bodies to carry tactile signals as well.

It was less an exogenous force than an internal one, according to Parker, who identifies the fuse that ignited the Cambrian explosion as the emergence of a single capability: photosensitivity, or the foundation of the modern eye.

The Cambrian explosion, as it’s now known, was a furious reshuffling of the evolutionary order. But although it constitutes a pivotal chapter in the history of life on Earth—perhaps the most consequential of all—its precise cause is not yet a settled matter.

It’s a reminder that we’ve never known existence without some sensory connection to the outside world,

the LGN sits somewhere between what the eye senses and what the brain understands; our goal was to decode the signals that pass through it along the way.

if a cat were shown a sequence of precisely controlled visual stimuli—in this case, brief movie clips of natural scenery—could we reconstruct the footage using nothing more than signals detected within its brain?

They made the compelling case that a full accounting of intelligence would, by its very nature, reveal not magic but processes—rules and principles—operating on measurable quantities over time in scrutable, even predictable ways. They were, in other words, my introduction to the philosophical implications of computation.

They tapped into our millennia-old desire to understand the mind—indeed, to make sense of intelligence itself—wading further into abstraction than I’d ever ventured, all while they maintained an unmistakably humanistic thread.

Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind.