Atoms grow into molecules; molecules grow into minds. Mind continues to evolve from the potential Central Nervous System structured within DNA, to actual reforming structure during gestation, to organizing sensory inputs after birth, to forming templates of the outside world, to forming symbols organizing concepts, to self-awareness, eventually to thought.

The path is through continuing organization to more complex assemblages that can perceive and integrate matter and energy into a semi-coherent thinking organism. All stages are layers built upon earlier layers with CNS guiding the integration. The first plateau is the formation of a viable biologic organism from the pattern within DNA into a structure that has survived and become living over billions of years. The second plateau is obtaining the ability to organize sensory stimuli into coherent patterns to give form and substance to the outside world. Building the library of patterns, the dictionaries and encyclopedias of recognizable stimulus patterns, permits the forming organism to interact with the world, to create and organize behaviors into modes of operation. At a sufficient level of complexity, self-awareness blooms as the individual relates the out-there to the in-here of unique identity; this is the macro-organizational structure analogous to the first organic packets forming cellular walls. Self-awareness is the first layer of an emergent property beyond the responses of a biochemical machine. Biologic structure would not predict this emergence and only in hindsight would its evolution seem a natural progression. The next plateau utilizes higher complexity in mental feedback paths to yield symbolism to emerge into growing abstract reasoning. Awareness blossoms as the pieces of a puzzle begin to fall into place and the sense of a macro view of the world is mapped. Congratulations.

Each of these layers builds on the previously established substrate. When the anti-entropic layer stabilizes, new sensory parts begin to stratify on the surface, increasing the complexity matrix by adding more possibilities. Just as the sensory images coalesce into a dictionary of recognized wave patterns in the neuronal net with the hippocampus organizing the short term memory into the dendritic reorganized connections and changed postsynaptic gap action potentials, long term memory is stabilized to be related into an encyclopedia of permanent knowledge. The continued building becomes the journal of your mental life and experiences that make up your personal history. Although only a relatively small portion of the hundred billion neurons take part in this formation of your personal identity, the information density rivals DNA, though it is in neuronal relations, not in molecular steps of codons. The 100 trillion neuronal interconnections, though chiefly building sensory and motor memories, form the basis of the integrated body and mind and serve as the informational reservoir for the neocortex high level functioning in the executive prefrontal cortex. The ability to lay down these memory traces and relate diverse engrams into new possibilities is the working definition of intelligence and creativity.

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