[visarga]

The loop, or more precisely the "search" does the novel part in thinking, the brain is just optimizing this process. Evolution could manage with the simplest model - copying with occasional errors, and in one run it made everyone of us. The moral - if you scale search the model can be dumb.

[robinei]

Let’s not underestimate the scale of the search which led to us though, even though you may be right in principle. In addition to deep time on earth, we may well be just part of a tiny fraction of a universe-wide and mostly fruitless search.