You're not alone

So we've explained that our quest is to find and simulate a simplification/reduction of the brain that displays intelligence. We summarized that we were gonna try many simplifications until one of those actually worked.

We lied... kind of. It's not that easy. This blog was created in order to show how we build ONE simplification that, we hope, works. We'll walk you through all that path trying to be as simple and explicit and possible.

Remember that everything is about finding and simulating a simplification of the brain that works. However we need to define what "it works" means in this context. But we won't... Let's just assume that we all can recognize intelligence (even if it we don't know how it works). At the end we may have a (measurable) definition of what intelligence means.

Let's start

In the most aggressive simplification we can make of the brain, we can deduce something: brain is not alone.

What do we mean by this? We mean that there's no brain if there's no body. If those were individual beings, we could say that they have a symbiotic relationship. Body takes advantage of the problem solving skills of the brain and brain obtains nutrients from it, and a place to live. Horrible analogy, but bear with us for a while.

When we observe in detail such relationship we observe that brain receives information from the body, like the senses such as sight, taste, etc, plus what is called propioception, such as hunger, body position, visceral pain, etc. The body receives info also, but the body is very reactive, a signal from the body always means a movement of some muscle, quite simple: stimulus reaction.

Let's do a very simple representation of that relationship.

From given body/brain relationship we know some things. First and most important of all: body deceives the brain. Body makes it believe it's alone... how? Body has certain cells that disguise themselves as neurons... so that real neurons make synapses with them, that's called transduction. That's how body passes information to the brain. Then, well, brain is connected to muscles also, and that's the way the brain passes information to the body.

That being said, we don't care about the body. That's a whole different ballgame. As we agreed, even if we don't know how intelligence works, we can recognize it, and so, we can agree that if a thing is intelligent, it can have the body of a dog, a human, or even a virtual body. Creating bodies for brains to live is not our quest. So we can see the problem this way:

Now, let's zoom in. Brain, as seen in that image can be taken for a function... and in a purely functional world, if you give the brain the same information at a given point, its response should be the same (2+2 is always 4), but that's not real. A response to a given stimulus at a given moment is different. Why? because the brain changes (learns), and it means that it's response will be different (ideally better) if the same stimulus is presented in the future.

Let's call this ability "learning", the ability of the brain to perform better as it acquires experience. One of the most important abilities that our simulation must display also.

So now, our brain looks like this

That loop in the image means the brain has two inputs and two outputs. Let's that second input/output the state. The brain produces it and passes it to itself. Just a way to represent learning, memory and everything that is inside the brain that doesn't come from the outside (body), nor goes to the outside (body).

Now, let's try to break out that state... how does the brain creates a state that represents such complex stuff such as short term and long term memory, lessons, experience, traumas, deductions, etc?

We don't know, so let's zoom deeper in into the brain.

Brain is composed of roughly 100,000,000,000 neurons. From what we know, they aren't just filling the space between our ears. They connect among them using their dendrites and creating synapses. Through such mechanisms they transmit electro chemical waves that go all over their skin, and who knows what else. They also receive those electro chemical waves (let's call them brain signals) from the outside through transduction. Brain doesn't receive the chocolate you just tasted, nor the blue light reflected from that car that just went by. Body translate all those signals into brain signals, then they travel all around those amazingly big population of neurons in what we experience like a chain of feelings, thoughts, and reactions, and ultimately they go out in the form of brain signals that connect to your muscles and voilá... muscle movement.

So the state we just previously talked about is somehow living in those neurons: in their connections, in their signals, in there. How do they do it?

That's what we are trying to discover. So first let's state the obvious: it's so fucking complex, right?

Indeed it is. Systems like the brain are actually called Complex systems, and brain is only one of them. They have in common that they are composed of many many elements that interact among themselves and somehow give for the emergence of phenomena difficult to predict: ant colonies, bee hives, cities (humanity), a galaxy, a human brain, stock market... the list is endless.

Hopefully that clue will point us in the right direction, so that's where we are gonna explore next.