A Brain with “Multiple Demand” Is What Drives Human Reasoning, Scientists Say

The article starts with asserting multiple times that reasoning is a uniquely human trait, yet offers no evidence at the point of that claim.

While on the surface we might like to take that at face value, we really shouldn't. The same thing was said about language until it was proven otherwise. Tool use, too, was proven not to be so unique to us, and later tool construction. Forward planning was thought uniquely human, but tool construction implies otherwise (as does my dog going to grab his favorite toy on the way to go outside and leaving it just inside the door for when he comes back in the house). Emotions other than fear were said to be unique to us, then we saw compassion within and across species. It's been shown that dogs and their people produce the same oxytocin response when looking one another in the eye. We've taught animals mazes, food choices, which lever is a reward vs a punishment, to sniff out truffles/drugs/explosives/cancer and communicate to us that they've found them. Dog can alert us to seizures, low blood sugar events, traffic, and the mood & possible intent of other humans. What of these can be done without some level of reasoning about the world?

To dismiss everything every species of animal does as instinct and elevate ourselves and superior and special in every way is hubris. Are we better at language, reasoning, creating tools, and such than other species? Sure. Does that mean we can say any of those things are distinctly and uniquely human without dismissing evidence about several other species? No, I don't think we can.

How meaningful is location for brain analysis?

You can reliably predict which physical DRAM cells are used to store your lives in the original Super Mario Bros on NES hardware (and you can manipulate that value if you have a Game Genie).

But you'll have a rather difficult time doing the same for your health level in Minecraft on a Windows PC.

Is the brain more like an NES, where the software generally uses the same place for the same thing?

Or is the brain more like a modern PC, where the physical location of any value is pseudo-randomly set by complex interactions of different subsystems -- paging, processes, OS and programming language allocators, garbage collection, etc., and will change from machine to machine, or even run to run on the same machine?

I don't follow this subject matter too closely, but I have read Marvin Minksy's "Society of Mind." Doesn't this "multiple demand" concept mirror what Minksy described back in the late 1980's as conflict and compromise between individual "agents"?