Neurons in human skin perform advanced calculations...

You still need somewhere in which to combine all the different and isolated specialised sensory inputs that are being transmitted by the neurons...

A bit like a big pan, where you can add all your separate ingredients, combining them to make a food experience that is greater than than the sum of it's parts.

Perhaps another analogy would be that that information is like software. It exists say on a hard drive. But a computer is needed for the information to express itself.
 
Perhaps another analogy would be that that information is like software. It exists say on a hard drive. But a computer is needed for the information to express itself.

Hmmm... I'm not sure. I was trying to get across the idea that organisms do process information without needing neurons. But as the organism gets bigger (more cells) and moves around as an individual, processing all the available information as a whole becomes more and more problematic for survival of individual group members. It seems to me that a groups individuals need to operate at least partly independently, so they can sense and react as individuals to their own specific environmental challenges, and thus survive for the good of the group.

So specialised senses developed, these were isolated within the organism, so that the information they produced was not processed as a whole.

This information was transmitted via neurons, and shielded en-route to a centralised structure (the brain), where the isolated information was presented to this centralised structure, by surrounding and encapsulating the centralised structure within the information that was being presented to it. A bit like a cage of information that is surrounding it.

This encapsulation effectively shielded the centralised structure, and forced it to only process information that was presented to it from its specialised isolated sensors.

The idea being that large individual organisms need isolated specialised external sensors to survive, but that this sensory data still has to be brought back together to be processed within a centralised structure that is forced to only process the sensory data from the organisms own specialised sensors.

Anyway... That's the way I see it... Lol... Neurons are part of a loop that transmits sensory data around large organisms, the other part of the loop is the 'read' part.

I think when this loop fails, the 'read' part can temporarily function, rather like any simple organism that processes information without any neurons at all (slime mold etc.) It's this failure that I suggest is responsible for the NDE in cardiac arrest patients.
 
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