Casual neuroscience chat in media res...

Dale Favier: Nope. There is no unified command in the brain. It's a circus in there. And the less aware of that you are, the more the clowns run the show. I hate it when people say, "fix your relationship with yourself," as if there was just one. Fix which relationship between which two selves? And with what? Duct tape and WD-40?

John JMesserly Maybe not leaves but billions of cockleburs, not aligned along a plane, but interpenetrating with a mass of interlocking dendtrite threads, elongated recently due to mutations in genes, and able to make unusually broad connections between seemingly unrelated cocklebur images.

Grady Ward Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, 1988. The notion that intelligence emerges from the complexity of simple components. Closely related to Cellular Automata and Complexity by Stephen Wolfram, 1994.

John JMesserly Minsky's metaphor was nice for a few pages but he got a bit long winded. I much prefer the relation to precepts in an individual's "Kosmos" that Whitman provided some images for. Some are uncannily prescient of the insights of modern neuroscience. For example, it would probably be a fruitful seminar to take the mind body exploration of Songs of Myself part 24 and juxtapose it with what Antonio Damasio explores in his introduction to neuroscience found in "Self comes to Mind" [...]

Grady Ward Well, a mash up of Walt's Milky multitudes and António's Somaticisms would be heady compost for a coordinated study. We would need a dedicated 3-d printer to replace the mental gears stripped in the turning of the axons: I sing the body Actinomycetes!
But being simple, a Gimpel among the skeptical, I would rather work bottom up rather than top down, to generalize from demonstrable cases rather than search the decay products of a poetic critical mass.

I remember one of my Los Altos roommates back in 1979 named Bill Gosper when we lived together with Richard Weyerauch. Bill was a brilliant and original mathematician who enjoyed applying the lisp and new Xerox machines to his rational subjects as continued fractions, fractals, and cellular automata, which had been far too tedious to research deeply by chalk and blackboard. Among many other things, he invented a notational way of computing Conway's Game of life future generations called hashlife, which was its own way of leap-frogging the intermediate calculations of simulation formations analogous to Newton's integral calculus shortcut of adding up all those infinite slices under a curve.

Fast forward to 2010.
First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life (summary of NewScientist article) http://boingboing.net/2010/06/18/first-self-replicati.html in which Andrew Wade discovered the 'Gemini' self-replicating pattern: basically, the double-helix for Conway's game. The importance of this discovery should not be underestimated. I would rate it a more important discovery than assembling individuals molecules to create a new life-form. And, yes, Wade used Bill's hashlife platform.

What it means essentially is that a large enough assemblage of simply-ruled elements can fundamentally leap its complexity frame and become alive. No limbic system needed, no hormonal amendments required. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that everything we associate with life will not follow from this profound discovery as to the surpassing emergence of complex life-forms from categorically simpler stuff.

Yes, we are still ants trying to make sense of a page of Vitruvius by walking over the page. We are still at the stage of trying to distinguish a pixel of type from a pixel of illustration. And no one claims that our human emotional structure doesn't shape and even define aspects and interaction of our cognition as per Damasio. But not all life and not all cognition and not all blades of grass.

Within a reasonable time I don't doubt that what we call mind, cognition, intelligence, and, yes, love, empathy and the contradiction within the multitudes will be modeled as surely as the power set of the simple countable aleph-null is the uncountable aleph-one.