How would you give a description of what “difficult” is? Wouldn’t you say that it is something we cannot easily do or comprehend? Something that is unfamiliar, that we have not exposed ourselves with, that needs skill and non-ordinary effort? Something complex?

Noesis Theory can consolidate all those definitions/explanations into one that has to do with the workings of the brain and one that… is actually quite simple 🙂

Difficult is any external stimuli that is out-of-context and that is governed by a level of complexity significantly larger than the one represented by the current state of our brain neurons that are tasked with “handling” these incoming signals. In other words, whenever the complexity of our environment is greater than the internal complexity we have managed to build inside our brains, in order to comprehend what is going on (in order to be able to predict the incoming signals and thus turn them into in-context), this is what we call difficult.

Even simpler “if complexity outside the brain is greater than complexity inside the brain => difficult“. Simple, isnt’ it? 🙂

The truthfulness of the above statement can be easily deduced by thinking of the methodologies we’re using in eliminating difficult:  we explain, we train, we experiment, we repeat… What is the purpose of this? It is an attempt to build inner neural complexity! Somebody can explain you a set of rules of how this stimuli occurs (explain)…. can showcase you specific occurence and the patterns it follows (train)… or if no rules are available can let you experiment or try again and again until you stumble upon the pattern by chance or method. In all of these cases, the end target is the same: you are trying to understand the rules of how this external system occurs and construct an internal representation inside your neural networks of the same type of complexity, in order to be able to predict at any time the potential expression of the external system. In this way you have transformed the out-of-context to in-context, you have PA links ready to send signals from input directly to output and you can handle this stimuli without thinking (i.e. without creating Driving Pockets and stealing Battery power).

One additional thing to note is how specifically this translates into signal traversal: since one of the basic rules that we have discussed in Noesis Theory is that “similar incoming signals traverse by default to neurons that are in the save “vicinity” (few hops needed to go from one to the other) this means that “easy” would be something that for minor alterations in input would require small alterations in the output needed!!

And reversing this (de morgan style), we have an even more specific (but possibly not of full coverage) definition of difficulty!

Difficult is a set of stimuli that for small alterations in the input require significant variation in the output.

So if you were tasked to translating Chinese and you were a European, you would need from an input of a set of vowels and consonants that are the same in both cases, produce as a translation a completely different word, depending on the pronunciation used! I.e. for a small variation in input (different pronunciation of the same syllables) you need to produce a significantly different output… This is difficult! And you need training and effort to construct a system of neurons inside your brain to match this complexity and be able to distinguish between these small input differences.

Do you want another example? If you’re playing with a Pro tennis player, he can quite easily insert some significant spinning into his throws towards you. But the exact amount of spin (and thus the final direction that the ball will travel to) is not easy to distinguish because you have very little input to judge (a slight variation in the trajectory of the ball until it bounces on the court, as well as possibly a slight adjustment in the hand positioning of your opponent when hitting the ball) thus it is quite difficult for you to adjust significantly your output to cope for the different responses you would need to give, depending on the spin of your opponent’s throw. And the fact that you have very little time to react increases the difficult even more because more intense action might be needed, i.e. more adverse output for these small input variations.

Isn’t difficult simple now?