The question should be stupidly simple to answer, right? After all, as human beings we have all seen the wonders that the brain is able to produce, with the epitome being the human civilization with its many wonders and scientific accomplishments.

But the brain is common for all living beings, not only humans. I.e. yes, for humans it is useful for thinking, for dreaming, for idea generation, for creating… But what about animals? Do all animals produce complex thoughts? Do all animals converse? We need to find a common answer that is simple yet holds true for all living beings of the present, of the past and of the future.

We know from the theory of Evolution that the brain is useful because it helps us survive & reproduce. But this answers the Why and not the How.

We also know from Evolution that since our current brain originated (although in less evolved forms) from more primitive living beings, this “How” should transcend the millennia in order to be common from human to birds, to mice, to dinosaurs, to snails, etc. So it needs to be extremely simple to suit all of those kinds of organisms of varying sophistication.

I will provide my personal answer to this How. In my opinion it is very simple but also very concrete. And it elegantly summarizes in a succinct way many of the key points of Noesis Theory:

The brain for the living beings is a predictor & alterer of the future. It

• uses up sensual stimuli from the present environment,
• capitalizes on past experience to produce expectations for future sensual stimuli (i.e. what will follow what I am experiencing now; what is the future),
• performs an “emotional coloring” of those expectations to decide whether this future is for good or bad
• focuses on the most important (good and bad) of those future outcomes and tries to come up with alternative futures that will maximize the pleasure or minimize/negate the discomfort
• For the most promising of those preferred future outcomes, it starts visualizing them and thus begins to alter the environment (through physical action), in order to make this alternate future the new reality
• Finally, it compares the actual future with the visualized (preferred) future, in order to recognized whether it succeeded in producing this altered, better reality, or it needs to try even harder.

In the above description of simple steps, you can try to picture either a snail doing it, or a human. It should work the same for both…!

To summarize again, in simpler words: I perceive my environment, I decide whether I like what is happening now and what will happen in the future, I try to come up with the best ways that can maximize my pleasure & alleviate my discomfort (current or future), I act upon them and compare the expected results of my actions with the reality, to adjust accordingly.

So there you have it, this is the utility of the brain. It is a tool that came up and evolution favored, because it offers to all living beings a capability of altering the future to their benefit.

A series of external stimuli that is in-context when it comes at a certain speed can also be out-of-context when it happens at a greater speed.

This can be easily explained by the traversal speed of the inner loop! Let’s think a bit about it: when you see a pattern, some current from the battery is used to expand this signal through the inner loop and bring some more patterns in your mind. This traversal through the inner loop is limited by the speed of your neural impulses. This means that if the next pattern in the series arrives in your sensory area before you have managed to “guess” it through activation of patterns via the inner loop… this new signal will not be negated by the selector (because the selector does not have something from the inner loop to compare and subtract it with) and thus will enter your brain whole as an “out-of-context” experience.

And this is how it can seem as out-of-context for us something that we’re quite used to it, but at a significantly slower speed. Examples are many, like speaking a language much faster than normal, but the most characteristic one is: speeding with a car. The faster you go, the quick the new stimuli (of surrounding environment) arrive to your perception and thus the more out-of-context they appear and thus… exciting (or fearful, depending on whether the DPs will be positive or negative ones).

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?

One big misconception that is well justified but dates back to Asimov’s days (or even earlier, I’m not that knowledgeable in the history of science fiction) is that robots do not have emotions. It seems pretty reasonable if you come to think of it. In the mind of everybody they’re made of algorithms, chips & metal, and a very structured language that leaves no room for emotion and inspiration. The essence of the human psyche cannot be fitted inside this pile of metal. It would be inappropriate and even degrading for the human nature.

In other words, according to public opinion, it’s ok if we manage to replicate our intelligence and rationality into another kind of existence (after all, it will be our creation, an expression, a copy of our mind), but only if it had no feelings, no true emotions. We would still have an edge over it. And we know from countless creations of literature and cinema how much we value our emotions and how useful they can be in overcoming difficulties and managing to surmount circumstances where pure, simple logic may be lacking. Emotion for us humans, even for hard-core science fiction fans or AI researchers, is a temple that should not be decimated. It is the ultimate boundary between what is true and what is artificial; a differentiating factor that sooths our mind when it would feel threatened by the AI manifestations that traverse and trespass into our realm of humanity.

Well, guess what: we were wrong! And it was not easy for us to figure it out… The road we had taken thus far when trying to create AI clearly indicated towards the inexistence of emotion. But if you look at Noesis Theory and you also believe that this is the correct way towards “true” AI (yes, still this is just a belief that has to be proven), you will see that emotion is everywhere. It is an integral part of the algorithm. And its name is… “Driving Pocket”.

Driving Pockets are the emotional responses of the Noesis algorithm. Think of it: what are the 3 key elements of an emotion?

1. It must have something to do with me (affinity of the incoming signal)
2. It must be different from what I expected it to be (out-of-context)
3. I should not have an easy way to alter it and make it the way I would like it to be (because in that case, the out-of-context experience would diminish and I would stop dealing with it)

The same 3 factors are also applicable to a Driving Pocket: it is produced by out-of-context stimuli (factor 2), it is produced by “agitating” a Driving Force to promise us some pleasure/discomfort (factor 1) and we have no easy way to turn it off, i.e. we have not created some P-A links to spring into action and resolve this out-of-context experience (factor 3).

The conclusion: Driving Pockets are the “emotions” of a brain that implements the Noesis Theory model. This means that any Artificial Intelligence that would be built with NT would automatically have emotions as an integral part of its operations. Even more specifically: it would not even be able to operate normally without experiencing emotions! And as the babies are full of emotions and as they grow up they learn to control their emotions, the same would hold true for this AI. At first it would be full of Driving Pockets (emotions) and with feedback and linked learning it would gradually transition into a state with less emotions, just like grown-up humans. But the emotions would always continue to be part of its normal functioning; it would always be its incentive to act, just like the same is true for humans.

I don’t know if this frightens you, but it is what the future holds and it is the only known way to create a sentient being. So whether we like it or not, true AI and emotions will go hand in hand, and we’ll have to find another edge for us.

There is a Greek saying that says “Κάθε πέρσι και καλύτερα” which in a literal, word-for-word sense would be translated to “every last year is better”. The meaning of this saying is that as years go by, things get worse and worse. Thus, the previous year is better than the current year which will be better than the next year, and so on and so forth.

This is certainly true in the current economic crises and most certainly in Greek, where things are quite bad. But this saying was not invented recently; it has been with us for many, many years. So its invention can certainly not be attributed to the current climate. So what is the source of this proverb? Is it simply a pessimistic approach to life that should be discarded? Or there is actual truth behind this?

Come to think of it, there are many other similar opinions that are expressed in a different way by many different people. I have heard many people say that they wish they could return to their teenage years, or even the childhood years, the years of innocence, where they could play all day and have fun. Is it the burden of work and responsibilities that pushes us to disfavor current reality and reminisce our early year? Well it certainly does play a part, but I would argue that most people would say that they preferred their early years than their adulthood, even if they are well endowed and don’t even need to work at all. Some might also go as far as to say that they would rather go back to the early years, where fun was just around the corner and emotions were true and strong.

I am going to use that last phrase and built an argument, saying that this aversion towards current reality and preference in the past is not just a pessimistic view on things and not localized only to some people or groups. It is a general wish that originates from the inner workings of the human mind and thus it is unavoidable to occur in all people, but of course in different intensity to each… And of course I am going to use Noesis Theory to prove it 🙂

In a few words, the “proof” is this: with years we build context and thus turn out-of-context experiences to in-context, which means that we have less signal getting into the brain and agitating the Driving Forces and creating Driving Pockets. And as you know, Driving Pockets are the emotional responses of the brain, which means that we have less & less opportunities to feel emotions (both good & bad). So every year that passes by, depending on how good we are in converting our experiences into knowledge and “context”, the less capable we become of experiencing new things and feeling intense emotions. Because the things that happen from then on are not new to us; they have a “been there, done that” sense and thus our reactions and emotional responses are smaller. We know how it feels when breaking up, we know how it feels when losing somebody, we know how it feels when failing or getting rejected, we know how it feels when going broke… In your first break-up, you might have been crying for a week. On your most recent one, you maybe just shrugged of your shoulders and moved on.

And it’s just the way it is. Your brain is built in a way to capitalize on any new experience and integrate its key points into its wirings. The next time you experience something similar, it is not that unexpected any more. You probably saw it coming. The third time, you already knew it was coming before it “hit” you and maybe  you managed to take action before. This quality of the brain is extremely useful for survival, but it is catastrophic for your happiness! Face it, we are not built for being happy!

So cherish your moments of happiness, because you will never get the same opportunity again. Be happy for today and make the most out of it. In a way, today is better than tomorrow, and although you will not avoid saying that “every last year was better”, but you might as well be able to complete the sentence with “and boy what fun did I have last year, indeed!”