ABSTRACT
For Edelman the brain is not a computer hardwired to process external stimuli, but is instead actively engaged in constructing the environment. That is, the mind is not a blank sheet upon which the external environment writes a program from which to actively engage the world, but instead we are born with certain capacities for action which serve to construct
and interpret the world. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the first to point out the possible existence of what he termed a priori categories of the mind, categories which exist prior to experience and help order the universe of external stimuli, but Edelman takes the view beyond this and argues that the way mind engages the world is an evolved capacity subject to selection. And in this, the morphology of the brain, the evolved anatomy, is the fundamental basis of behaviour and consciousness. Edelman considered that natural selection was an elementary component of the genesis of mind and individual consciousness:
The fundamental basis for all behaviour and for the emergence of mind is animal and species morphology (anatomy) and how it functions. Natural selection acts on individuals as they compete within and between species. From studying the paleontological record it follows that what we call mind emerged only at a particular time during evolution [thus]. . . . The centre of any connection between psychology and biology rests, of course, with the facts of evolution. It was Darwin who first recognized that natural selection had to account even for the emergence of human consciousness.
