Thoughts on Opening the Forums

[David Olmsted]

Humanity finally has a theory of the brain that works!

Long ago and far away when I was in graduate school during the early 1980's at Michigan State University where I was hoping to learn something about how the brain really worked I eventually realized that no one had a clue about how it worked and what was worse was that no one was even on the right investigative track. At the time no computational neuroscience programs existed so I picked the closest thing at the time which was Systems Simulation from the Electrical Engineering department. It simulated models having boxes and circles which were connected by lines. Also they had a flexible program in which I was able to take almost whatever classes I wanted (as opposed to the Computer Science Department which was very rigid).

Soon I realized I didn't have a clue to how the brain worked either but I did have some ideas on how to approach the problem but I knew it was going to take some time to develop and that that the attempt would be a very risky proposition .... too risky and different from the mainstream to get any funding in the normal academic career progression. So I left, got married, and got a job but I kept working on the problem off and on with enough advances to know I was on the right track.

Even today I am amazed at how little has changed in the world of computational or theoretical neuroscience. Models still are centered around summation operations and floating point number are used instead of action potentials. Despite huge increases in computer power and the coming and going of various fads, the real advances have been very minimal. Surely, after all this time with some very smart people working on the problem someone would step back and conclude that the whole approach is wrong.

Anyway, the theory of Soft State Automata and this software which is based upon its equations and principles is the result of this long term investigation. The key to developing Soft State Automata as the theory of the brain was the eventual realization that the brain does not have a central clock to sequence a set of global states as does a computer. The analysis of this situation resulted in a novel and deep theory of causality that naturally led to characteristics similar to that exhibited by the brain and showed that binary logic and Finite State Machines are special cases of a more general concept.

What is actually simulated by the "neurons" in this software are the functional characteristics of Soft State Processing which biological systems such as the brain seek to emulate. The result is that one can identify the control variables for the neurons which is not the case if the simulation is based upon their bio-electrical properties only. The situation is analogous to humans learning to fly. Some sought to mimic bird flight without success while the Wright brothers gained an understanding of the underlying theory of aerodynamics and with that gained an understanding of what parameters had to be controlled. The Wright brothers always pointed out that they invented CONTROLLED flight.

I should also add that the simulation is much faster using the simpler Soft State equations instead of the more complex neural electrical equations.

So the release of this software and the opening of this forum is analogous to the Wright brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk. The Real Simulated Intelligence, R.S.I. (not Artificial Intelligence, A.I.) displayed here may not be too practical at the moment but in 10 years it will be a significant industry as this software becomes more powerful and I am able to experiment with my ideas for the cortex and cerebellum. Perhaps even more importantly, determining how the brain really works will aid in finding medical and behavioral cures for mental illnesses (I suspect many are caused by the improper tuning of a set of neurons) and determining what conscious sensations are not (with immense consequences for understanding our place in the universe).