However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.