I like some of the other answers, but they aren’t phrased how I would explain it, so I’ll add my own. This is something like the cybernetics answer to your question.
The world is made of “stuff”. This “stuff” is a mixed soup that has no inherent divisions. But then some of this stuff gets organized into negative feedback processes, and the telos of these feedback processes creates meaning when they extract information from sensors. This information extraction tells this from that in order for the stuff thus organized to do things. From this we get the basis of what we call minds: stuff arranged to perform negative feedback that generates information about the world via observation that models the world to change behavior. Stack enough of these minds up and you get interesting stuff like plants and animals and machines.
So the brain, though kind of weird to think about, is just this kind of control system, or rather an agglomeration of control systems, that is able to do things like map the territory it finds itself in.
I try to cover this topic in some depth in this chapter of my in-progress book, here.
I like some of the other answers, but they aren’t phrased how I would explain it, so I’ll add my own. This is something like the cybernetics answer to your question.
The world is made of “stuff”. This “stuff” is a mixed soup that has no inherent divisions. But then some of this stuff gets organized into negative feedback processes, and the telos of these feedback processes creates meaning when they extract information from sensors. This information extraction tells this from that in order for the stuff thus organized to do things. From this we get the basis of what we call minds: stuff arranged to perform negative feedback that generates information about the world via observation that models the world to change behavior. Stack enough of these minds up and you get interesting stuff like plants and animals and machines.
So the brain, though kind of weird to think about, is just this kind of control system, or rather an agglomeration of control systems, that is able to do things like map the territory it finds itself in.
I try to cover this topic in some depth in this chapter of my in-progress book, here.