Self Comes to Mind

within a certain sector of the range, however, living tissues flourish and their function becomes more efficient and economic. Operating near the extremes of the range, if only for brief periods of time, is actually an important advantage in unfavorable life conditions, but nonetheless life states operating close to the efficient range are preferable. It is reasonable to conclude that the primitive of organism value is inscribed in the configurations of physiological parameters. Biological value moves up or down a scale relative to the life-effectiveness of the physical state. In a way, biological value is a surrogate of physiological efficiency.
    My hypothesis is that objects and processes we confront in our daily lives acquire their assigned value by reference to this primitive of naturally selected organism value. The values that humans attribute to objects and activities would bear some relation, no matter how indirect or remote, to the two following conditions: first, the general maintenance of living tissue within the homeostatic range suitable to its current context; second, the particular regulation required for the process to operate within the sector of the homeostatic range associated with well-being relative to the current context.
    For whole organisms, then, the primitive of value is the physiological state of living tissue within a survivable, homeostatic range . The continuous representation of chemical parameters within the brain allows nonconscious brain devices to detect and measure departures from the homeostatic range and thus act as sensors for the degree of internal need. In turn, the measured departure from homeostatic range allows yet other brain devices to command corrective actions and even to promote incentive or disincentive for corrections, depending on the urgency of response. A simple record of such proceedings is the basis of the prediction of future conditions.
    In brains capable of representing internal states in the form of maps, and potentially having minds and consciousness, the parameters associated with a homeostatic range correspond, at conscious levels of processing, to the experiences of pain and pleasure. Subsequently, in brains capable of language, those experiences can be assigned specific linguistic labels and called by their names— pleasure, well-being, discomfort, pain.
    If you turn to a standard dictionary and look up the word value , you will find something like the following: “relative worth (monetary, material, or otherwise); merit; importance; medium of exchange; amount of something that can be exchanged for something else; the quality of a thing which renders it desirable or useful; utility; cost; price.” As you can see, biological value is the root of all those meanings.
The Success of Our Early Forerunners
     
    What made organism-vehicles so brilliantly successful? What opened the way for complex creatures such as ours? One important ingredient for our arrival appears to be something plants do not have but that we and some other animals do: movement . Plants can have tropisms; some can turn to or away from the sun and the shadows; and some, like the carnivorous Venus flytrap, can even catch distracted insects; but no plant can uproot itself and go seek a better environment in another part of the garden. The gardener must do that for it. The tragedy of plants, though they do not know it, is that their corseted cells could never change their shape enough to become neurons. Plants have no neurons and, in the absence of neurons, never a mind.
    Independent organisms without brains also developed another important ingredient: the ability to sense changes in physiological condition, inside their own perimeter and in their surround. Even bacteria respond to sunlight as well as to countless molecules; bacteria in a petri dish will respond to the drop of a toxic substance by clumping together and recoiling from the threat. Eukaryotic cells also sensed the equivalent of touch and vibration. The changes sensed either in the interior or in the surrounding environment could lead to movement from one place to another. But in order to respond to a situation in an effective manner, the brain equivalent of single cells also has to harbor a response policy , a set of extremely simple rules according to which it makes a “decision to move” when certain conditions are met.
    In brief, the minimal features that such simple organisms had to have so that they could succeed and