Functional constructivism is based on... philosophical constructivism... that all knowledge about the world is based on... our systematic interface. … - Joscha Bach

How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows. ...[A]bout 2% of the genome is coding for proteins, and maybe about 10%... tells you when to express which protein, and the remainder is mostly garbage. It's old viruses that are left over and it's never been properly deleted [etc.] because there are no real code revisions in the genome. ...How much of this 10%, [i.e.,] about 75 megabytes code for the brain, we don't really know. What we do know is that we share almost all of this with mice. Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed to fix some of the genetic expressions. ...Most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism and what your body looks like, [etc.]...

There are some animals like elephants that have larger brains than us and they don't seem to be smarter. ...Elephants seem to be autistic. They have very, very good motor control and they're really good with details, but really struggle to see the big picture. ...[Y]ou can make them recreate drawings stroke by stroke... but they cannot reproduce a still life... of a scene... Why is that? Maybe smarter elephants would meditate themselves out of existence because their brains are too large. So... that elephants that were not autistic, they didn't reproduce.

[E]verything that we're going to do is some approximation of Solomonoff Induction. ...[O]ur concepts cannot really refer to facts in the world out there. We do not get the truth by referring to stuff out there in the world. We get meaning by suitably encoding the patterns in our systemic interface.