Mark,

IMO, the random part is a cop-out--a marker for something we don't know. I've never explored cosmology or evolution seriously, but I've been highly suspicious of supposed random underpinnings. I've used randomness in experimental design as a measuring stick--something to reject. In that way of thinking, one can't accept randomness as an explanation. We design our studies that way.

For cognitive science--all the way back to Descartes--it was (and is) a search for mechanism. In modern thinking, it's information processing (software). In modern neuroscience, it's neural systems (hardware). The battleground for putting these things together has been the study of (mostly visual) perception--and that's where Karl Pribram worked.

The deeper problem, not seriously considered by us, is where the mechanism came from in the first place--which brings us back to your question and Carl's work. I'm open to almost anything but random based models.

Ray