In the beginning there was brain

Let there be mind! I have finally decided to proceed with my brain building project, the Zero Intelligence Architecture (zia). This blog should serve as a biography for zia, as well as some kind of program documentation. The advantage over program documentation is that there is space here to discuss the alternatives that were rejected, as well as allow comments and, ideally, a fruitful idea exchange with the community. There is of course a multitude of very deep and tricky questions pertaining to this attempt, and many of them may never even have occurred to me so far. Many others I have answered to my satisfaction, while others still have troubled me for years and I have made little progress so far. In any case, my ambition is to RAD the project without any particular software engineering or project management approach, coding in the easy parts in all kinds of top-bottom, bottom-up, midway-out sequences. In a little more detail, I envisioned a software system with monstrous properties, with distributed, migrating, dynamic, freezable processes in all kinds of configurations, compiled and assembled from multiple sources and languages and frameworks. In short, “my” brain is more of an operating system than a program, and could end up packaged in a virtual Linux machine pretty soon. Until then, I will be proceeding with some scripts that would tie OpenCYC with some (3rd party) NLP code and my own “worlddb”, an unspecified as of yet structure that would encapsulate all the brain knows up to a point.

Without further ado, I am asserting that a brain is just a predictive structure (an interpretation) for the micro-environment of a localised physical configuration (also known as an organism), and the controlling loop of the brain should be:
L0 forever: use interpretation for predictions, refine interpretation

I am also asserting that what makes (part of) an organism a brain is continuity: survival and reproduction means the brain has time to become interesting and relevant. There are interesting properties attached to continuity, for example strategies that have proved very promising: treating other physical configurations as brains, distinguishing between animals and plans, and the zillion others cognitive sciences study. It is conceivable that all of these have “evolved”, but I will take as many shortcuts as possible to allow zia to evolve from a common-sense starting point. It is most interesting project to go for “total evolution”, ie have a brain deduce from god-knows-what inputs that it lives in a 3d world etc etc, but zia aims to look more like a 4 year old at birth. Two other research projects that are relevant and related but I do not want to address (yet) is an analysis of why societies progress technologically when the members do not necessarily progress intellectually, as well as the development of a generic method to distribute computation, eg a good way to covert a minimax chess algorithm to stream processing code.

What about softer aspects of the brain such as “who am I”, “why am I here”? Well, assuming other brains will have to be evaluated as friends or foes for the purposes of the loop L0, there could be a reflective use of the relevant functions, but I do not expect much from it at this stage. Consciousness? Well, Igor Aleksander’s 5 axioms are unimpressive: Imagination and planning are matter-of-fact attributes of the scheming brain, sense of place is not only key in the darwinian struggle but is arguably optional for less localised intellects, decision/emotion is a behavioural mode that can contradict the “conscious” qualia (I mean, it is too much of an automation), and directed attention may just be a computational limitation of the human brain.