Emergence of Life 2.0 in the Brain?

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Abstract:  Did self-replication emerge in the brain? If yes, what could be its underlying neural mechanism? And what could be (if any) the computational function of the resulting Darwinian process? In this talk, I’ll ask these questions and discuss computationally informed guesses. In particular, I focus on multiple rounds of copying and selection of neural activity patterns as opposed to a one-shot selection of anatomical structures as proposed under the name of neural darwinism. Proposed mechanisms also point at various possibilities of emergent self-replication of informational patterns over rich-enough computational substates, possibly generalizable to other-than neural domains.