Environment

Introduction

Why this page?

Environments come in all sorts of form and sizes. While humans live within a human centric environment, we evolved in a world that has gone through many changes, many of which are due to the organisms that inhabited them, including us humans. But here we will be taking the meaning to be that of the conditions that an organism lives in, or that is subjected to. This opens the meaning up to many other forms of life, including the environment that the cells that you are constructed from, and are subject to, that is, the other cells that surround them, the spaces between those cells, and the external environment, that environment that hosts microbes that may become a member of your internal environment, such as the digestive tract.

The earliest environment on earth were devoid of complex life, creating a habitat of very much sameness, what scientist may consider as being homogeneous. As life evolved, and its complexity increased, the interactions between organisms also became more complex, as did the environment, due to the fact that the organisms are the environment. Scientists would consider that the environment evolved from that more homogeneous state to one that is more complex and therefore more heterogeneous. These two concepts are key to understanding intelligence and how intelligence evolved.

As this site is dedicated to AI, we will consider how the environment can affect the strategies of adaptive dynamic intelligent systems such as the human brain. The environment is key to programming intelligent systems such as the human brain. This is the crux of how nurture imprints the environment upon the systems components.

Environments at Scale

The earliest life evolved at microscopic scales, where chemical reactions were contained within small vessels or niches, secluded from the chaos of the general environment. These proto forms of life became the bacteria that we recognise today. But when single cells started to accumulate and become colonies, then the environment evolved from that affecting the single cell to that of the community.

Over hundreds of millions of years, those colonies became organisms such as you.

The Evolving Environment

Environments evolve due to the intelligences that are subject to them and embedded within them. As those neural circuits that construct the thoughts of the lifeforms that inhabit an environment, so do those thoughts evolve new strategies and concerns, due to that evolving environment.

For an organism to process new environmental concerns, it either needs to evolve neurons that are already wired for a specific task, thus repurposing those neurons; expand those neural networks it already has, by increasing the number of neurons it already has, so as to expand its knowledge and gain new insights into what the organism already knows; or, to grow new neural circuits from scratch.

Such an evolution of an organism will cause a cascade of information to permeate the environment, causing other organisms to react to those new strategies.

As such, Evolution and Environment are entwined in a cascade of action, reaction.

We will expand upon these ideas within this section, The Evolving Environment.

The External Environment

The external environment are those things that affect the organism directly thought its senses. The external environment is imprinted within the neural circuits of the organism, imprinted in such a way as to cause it to react to that environment in intelligent ways.

The Internal Environment

Do you realise that your thoughts are not solely produced by yourself, but are also due to the bacteria within you. Whatever your thinking now, may also be considered as the collective thoughts of those interacting microorganisms.

The internal environment seems to go back to the origins of multicellular life on earth. Choanoflagellates are small spherical balls of single cell communities. These communities surround a core of bacteria. Further to this, our common ancestors going back more than six hundred millions of years, were probably worm like creatures living at the bottom of the sea, grazing upon bacterial matts that covered the seabed’s at those times. Bacteria have been shown to affect the connections of the brains of organisms, and the microbiome is currently of interest for how it may affect the human brain and how it can impact upon our health, both physically and mentally. We will be delving further into this subject thoughout this section.

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