The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation.
In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the notion of self-organised criticality is an explanatory kernel here.
Question: What if brains, among countless other resilient communications networks and emergently complex systems of interest, does not approach or approximate to quasicriticality but acts as a primary transmission medium for it?
On a spectrum from simple sandpiles through inordinately complex battlespaces, to ecological networks and much, much further into cosmological questions of inexplicably delicate fine tuning and logical self-containment – the remarkable diversity of instances should, as the trees, not blind us to the self-organising unity of the forest.
What if the binding principle is not explicable in terms of its instances but can only ever be comprehensively approached, inversely, from a perspective that this criticality is not the consequence but the cause?
Daedelus Kite 