Brain Storms - Some of the Background Blog Posts

When I started thinking about the possible links between the computer Language CODIL and the human brain a few years ago I started by posting a series of "Brain Storms"on my blog Trapped by the Box and some of the more interesting ones are listed below.

1. Introduction
2. The Black Hole in Brain Research
3. Evolutionary Factors starting on the African Plains
4. Requirements of a Target Model
5. Some Factors in choosing a Model 
6. CODIL and Natural Language
7. Getting rid of those Pesky Numbers
8. Was Douglas Adams right about the Dolphins?
9. The Evolution of Intelligence - From Neural Nets to Langauge
10. The Limitations of the Stored Program Computer
11. An Evolutionary Model of the Brain's Internal Language
12. Step outside the Box to understand the Evolution of Intelligence
13. How the Human Brain works - Concept Cells, Memodes and CODIL

Some other early posts may also be of interest.

• The Curse of Knowledge  1 August 2011
• The Black Hole in "The Believing Brain (Book Review) July 2012

• A Simple Guide to the Relationship between Neurons, Natural Language and CODIL  

• Filling in the Black Hole in Brain Research 9 July 2014
• The Trouble with Brain Science - History suggests Possible Solutions  22 July 2014
• A Breakthrough - CODIL and Superior Pattern Matching  24 May 2015
• How to Build a Simple Model of Something as Complex as a Brain   5 June 2015
• The Need for a Symbolic Brain Language  24 June 2015
• The Futile Search for the Philosopher's Stone of Intelligence  7 August 2015
• Why Our Brains are Shrinking 23 April 2017

Over the last couple of years I have been attempting to bring these, and other ideas, together in a paper, and this has been slow work because it involves many different disciplines and I know some people will find the ideas controversial.  Two developments have helped in this process.

The first was doing a FutureLearn course on"Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World" put on by the University of Groningen last year. Doing this highlighted the importance of making a clear distinction between complex uncertain systems and complicated deterministic systems.

The second relates to the need to define a mathematical framework which would contain the model. My initial idea of an infinite recursive network really had too many degrees of freedom - but I found a good starting point was to map evolution onto a network with genetic information being passed through the generations. The complete network was a complicated but fully deterministic one, but because the individual animal nodes only had a short lifetime all that could be seen was a window onto the current living generation - which was complex because the paths to it were invisible.

As a result I am currently drafting the paper, in a number of sections, and progress will be reported on this blog, together with notes on relevant topics, and answers to any questions you ask about how my model fits in with other research.