Scientific Brain Model Chapter VI

 CHAPTER VI - Elaborating complex plans with the concepts of our conscious knowledge Encyclopedia, that we reasoned out from our unconscious wisdom associations: Who could have guessed it?, the scientific method is inspired in the brain's basic learning method, in general, and reasoning ability, in particular!

 * As much as most frequently we follow someone else's recipe to accomplish what we want, sometimes we also (voluntarily or involuntarily) try something different and figure out stuff on our own.

As it can be seen, nothing here is to say, there has never been any so-called "aha moments"; but there is absolutely no reason, why we can be at all certain, they are the result of the genius of a intelligent, decision-making agent inside our brains. Rather, it is perfectly possible to conceive a scientific model, which - without the assumption of the existence of such a intelligent agent - exhibits the exact same self-conscious behavior; but explains much better all other data and conducts, as well as makes testable predictions. A key consideration for the viability of such a model of the brain is the degree of randomness exhibited by neurons. Namely, no neuron will ever react in exactly the same way to exactly the same input. Thus, it should not be of any surprise, that under the exact same circumstances, we never act in exactly the same way. To begin with, the circumstances are never exactly the same. We are constantly exploring, trying something new; perhaps we do not have other choice: perhaps we currently do not have available the preferable ingredient, prehaps the safest crossing is today not traversable. Even when we know, what is exactly that we have to do to accomplish our aim, and have all intention to follow to the letter the good, old plan, we never proceed in exactly the same way: we never apply the exact same force, we never go as fast or as carefully, we never do it under the same conditions, etc.. What the heck, perhaps we just want to show we can better the wheel!

* We most often find out new stuff, when we come across an unexpected or striking event. If it constitutes a positive experience, we will want to be able to repeat it; whereas we will want to avoid it in the future, if it was a negative experience. In any case, how do we mentally trace back our steps, and come to (consciously) learn what exact sequence of events led to such a relevant outcome?

Fact of the matter is the end result is never exactly equal. The whole purpose of the brain is then to extract conclusions of every new experience, in order to optimize our interactions with the world outside: if the end result came to be a significant surprise, we will want to know what let to such a startling outcome. Needless to say, if the experience ended up in success, it would only be smart to repeat it in the future, whereas if it was a failure, we should avoid following that path next time. In other words, our brain will try to remember and go through everything that happened, and make changes accordingly: in grossly simplified terms, those neurons, whose vigorous activity contributed to a successful outcome, will be reinforced; whereas those which lead to failures will be repressed. These adaptations will not only modify our subsequent reasonings, but even more so our instinc; it is just that, obviously, we will only be conscious of the manner in which our reasonings has changed. 

* Little by little we develop som intuition of what is the cause of the striking event, until we finally put the hypothesis to a test. If it gets confirmed, it will enter our conscious knowledge.

  

We can think of the changes in our reasonings as modifications to the concepts maintained in our 'consciousness-accessible' knowledge base: If brown eggs and white eggs produce the exact same results, we will come to think of them as the same thing. If we start experiencing hallucinations after taking some mushrooms, we will look for visual, olfactory or tactile cues to help us differentiate them from other mushrooms, which do not cause such psychedelic effects. If you accumulate enough practice, you will get some intuition, that stirring vigorously avoids unwanted lumps in your mashed potatoes, until (not unlike the scientific method prescribes) you finally think of putting the hypothesis to a test and acquire conscious knowledge of the trick. Hence, regardless of how exactly it happens, what are the neural underpinnings involved or how we want to call it ("confirmation of a hypothesis", "realization" or "aha moment"), all these moments, where we confirm some intuition, mark the transition to where a piece of knowledge enters our 'consciousness-accessible' knowledge base, we gain awareness of it, and it becomes available to our reason.

 

* Conscious concepts code in natural language information on things, that our brain's planning mechanism can then utilize to build sequences of actions for the achievement of our goals.

We can therefore start to elucidate the origin of reason, as a mechanism whereby the organism could learn sequence of actions to attain a certain goal. Our instinct is really good and reliable at learning associations; but sometimes there is not quite a straightforward link between precursor an goal. Indeed, there is nothing in a bunch of wheat screaming: "You can make some bread out of me, by following these steps!" Rather, it generally takes some playing before achieving some reward from a given starting state. Thus, if you ever hit the jackpot, it will only make sense to try to reconstruct the sequence of actions, which led to such fantastic outcome. What milestones did we go through? How did we traverse from one to the next? The problem is that everything in real life is unique, and each milestone will never appear exactly identical as the first time, nor will we ever be able to make the transition between two consecutive milestones in the exact equal fashion. But, hey!, for exactly that reason we build ourselves concepts, didn't we!? Indeed, the current instance may be slightly different, but so long it represents the same concept, it will work basically the same, and by applying the rules we have acquired about such a concept, we will yield equivalent results. Until now, you may have got some intuition as of whether a person's smile is genuine or not; but, from now on you know a technique, with which (assuming my trick is correct) you will be able to tell (for any person, regardless of sex, race, age, etc.), whether a smile is genuine or not, by looking for wrinkles next to the outter corner of the eyes. In other words, now you are familiar with the concept of genuine-smile wrinkles.

Consequently, the moment where a concept enters our 'consciousness-accessible- knowledge base and we gain awareness of it, represents in practical terms the point in time from which said concept becomes available to be utilized in our complex plans (that is, the sequences of actions we routinely put together, in order to achieve our goals). 

* A concept's name seems to work as the key of a database, or the index of an encyclopedia, indicating the page, where all our natural-language-coded information relative to said concept can be found. 

Now, if - as represented by our intuition - a piece of knowledge was already there (albeit only unconsciously), what leads to said knowledge to now becoming available to our consciousness? From all the discussion above, it  stands to reason to say, that the answer is very much related to the moment the given concept gets a name. Indeed, a concept's name seems to work as the key of a database, or the index of an encyclopedia, indicating the page, where all the information relative to said concept can be found. Thus, absent of such a key, such knowledge cannot be directly (consciously) accessed by our brain's reasoning and planning mechanisms.

* the recognition of an external body delivers the key with which all the natural-language-coded knowledge on said thing gets activated and becomes accessible. 

Interestingly, there is all reason to believe, that these (concepts' names) are the same keys delivered by the recognition process. If this is correct, the recognition of an external body from some perceptual cues represents the activation of all the information contained in the corresponding Encyclopedia's entry. Continuing this reasoning, (as argued at the beginning of this discussion) our brain's perceptual systems do not construct a comprehensive and detailed description of our surroundings (as advocated by Biederman and others). Rather, it would be more accurate to view the process, as if the perceptual systems would be typing on the Encyclopedia's keyboard: Namely, as the focus of attention is shifted from one perceptual stimulus to the next, everytime an external body gets recognized, the corresponding key will be pressed on the keyboard. Thus, if we look around and see a cup of tea sitting on a table; the code that will be generated would be something like: a cup of tea on a table.

    

* Our knowledge can be thought of as being made up of the instinctive wisdom - we accumulate over time from practical experience and is not directly accessible to our consciousness -, and our natural-language-coded encyclopedia - or the consciousness-accessible knowledge - we normally acquire through reasoning, other people's teachings and theoretical study -. 

Now, it may cause some confusion, that all until now, I have been talking of a 'consciousness-accessible- knowledge base, and, all of a sudden, I start referring to, what seems to be the same thing, under the name of Encyclopedia. So far, I have been employing the term 'consciousness-accessible- knowledge base in counterposition to the wisdom - we accumulate over time from practical experience -, which is not directly accessible to our consciousness. On the other hand, Encyclopedia refers to the knowledge - we normally acquire through reasoning, other people's teachings and theoretical study -, which we typically associate to our conscious knowledge. In order to make this point clearer, it may be useful to consider the example of an experienced master chess player. Clearly, somebody whoe has spend infinite hours playing Chess, will only need to take a look at a given position, in order to know, to get a very strong intuition , whether said position is advantageous or not. In contrast, an inexperienced player will have to try hard to look ahead, by exploring all possible combinations, in order to make up his mind on how to move next. This is not to say that our chess master will not use his reason while playing Chess, though. Without a doubt, throughout his long experience, he has analyze each and every game and spent endless hours trying to fathom out, what led to defeat or what were the keys for success. Neither would it make any sense to sustain that a chess master does not use any expert conscious knowledge; but only determines his moves out of the (unconscious) wisdom he accumulated from experience. Certainly, he will know by heart many standard sequences of movements, such as openings, how to check-mate his opponent from certain end-game positions, etc.. Furthermore, the kind of (conscious) reasoning an inexperienced chess player could follow to look ahead his next move, does not only employ his reason, but will obviously never be possible without all the processing being carried out unconsciously. In any case, what appears hardest to argue is that someone could be considered to have a superior brain, just because he or she has spent infinite hours studying and playing Chess, or, as it would be my case, takes each an every time two hours to mull over his next move. The crucial factor is always the amount of energies one is willing to invest. In fact, any such intellectual superiority would not reflect on any other task, until a similar effort is made. While it seems clear that unconscious wisdom results from lots of experience and practice, an analogous argument can be made about reason. Indeed, every brain is endowed with the very same mechanism, whereby one may mull over one's experiences and try to fathom out causes for the observed outcomes, as well as later put in effect the recipes one may have so found out or acquired from someone else. Furthermore, it does not make any sense to attribute more value to conscious knowledge over (unconscious) wisdom, as we have been indoctrinated to think since beginning of Civilization. For instance, just because you could not spell out with words how to distinguish a genuine smile from a fake smile, does not make you more stupid than if you could. To begin with, you probably are better off following your own instinct to tell a fake smile, than using my trick.

* In fact, the observation that there is (unconscious) wisdom - which cannot be expressed with words - and conscious knowledge - which can be expressed with words - evidences that the purpose of our reason is to figure out recipes to achieve a certain goal, and our conscious thinking represents the execution of such sequences of actions. Indeed, to the extent that (natural-language-coded) concepts are the basic components of our brain's planning mechanism's sequences of actions, it will be impossible to elaborate a certain sequence of actions, if the pertinent concepts are not available. Or how do you plan to make an omelette, if you have no concept of what is an egg? 

For instance, if we are not able to produce a written explanation as of how to distinguish a male voice from a woman's voice, it is because we never followed any sequence of actions in order to solve this task; that is, we never learned any kind of sequence of actions, that we could later follow to tell between men's voices and women's voices. Now, there is likewise a very simple reason, why we have never learned any such sequence of actions: Namely, we lack, we never formed ourselves, the sort of auditory concepts necessary to build a sequence of actions of that kind. Indeed, it stands to reason that these sequences of actions - which represent the basis of our conscious behaviors -, consists in lists of steps to traverse from an initial state to a final state. Furthermore, each step itself becomes in turn defined by the action to be executed, as well as the specifications of the states at the beginning and the end of the step. Now, interestingly enough, while states can be spelled out with nouns, adjectives and prepositions; actions, on the other hand, can be spelled out with verbs and adverbs. At any rate, each and all of these are concepts themselves.

I have no doubt, that computer scientists (especially object-oriented programmers) will most definitely recognize a depiction of this sort: Namely, natural (human) language is (as a form of lingua franca) the self-generated, self-learned (object-oriented) programming language utilized by the brain, concepts are encapsulations of such natural-language-coded specifications, and the sequences of actions, which represent the basis of our conscious behaviors, are nothing but scripts or, in computer science terms programs written in natural language.

It then follows that in order to form a concept, it becomes necessary to give it a name and spell it out with words. Furthermore, if we accept that sequences of actions are coded in natural language, if 'a thing' cannot be expressed with words, it obviously cannot be referenced in a sequence of actions script. It would, for example, not make any sense if a step of a script would read something like: "Add a cup of 'the thing" to the mixture. The connection of conscious thinking and language is in fact so tight that even arithmetic 'recipes' need to be conducted in our mother tongue. This is particularly evident in counting: someone may be perfectly fluent in a second language; but, when it comes to counting, we all resort to the language we were raised on. 

Now, you would be right to ask, what if we choose to give a name to a thing, that we cannot spell out with words? It would only make sense to say, that we would not be able to form ourselves a concept of the thing. Since, it has a name, it could be referenced in a sentence; but it would not make any sense, as if a recipe states: "Add a cup of gniht to the mixture". Consequently, although it may sound odd, I guess it would be fair to say, that we do not have a concept of what is a man's voice or a woman's voice. Certainly, we have a concept of what is a man and what is a woman, as well as what is a voice. We would then be able to explain, that a woman's voice is a voice belonging to a woman and a man's voice is a voice belonging to a man; but that is as far as we can go.

The argument pales a little, however, if the question is, whether we have a concept of a woman's face and a man's face. We are not able to spell out, how does a woman's voice or a man's voice sounds like; but we would  be able to sort of spell out, how a woman's face or a man's face looks like. Indeed, albeit not quite precisely, we could describe a woman's face and a man's face, and how one differentiates from the other, in terms of basic visual concepts such as circles, triangles, curves, straight lines, etc..      

Hence, it would probably be more accurate to say, that we can artificially create concepts, by giving names to things; but they will remain meaningless and so useless, to the degree to which we are not able to spell them out with words. This is frequently the case with abstract concepts, which we are taught by other people. As abstract concepts, they are not backed by any personal perceptual experience, and there is therefore not a good way to discern, whether the explanation provided by the other person, as of how the thing works is correct or not. Nowadays, in the modern society of ours, where human knowledge has grown esoterically complex and sophisticated, and we need again and again upper-class experts to explain everything to us, the examples of this are countless: Let us begin with the obscene eternal myth of "freedom". In our fake-Democracy world of "freedom", we are told to be free to do whatever we want; however, in reality, the way it works is that only those with a buttload of money will be actually free to do and get whatever they want (e.g. the best education, the best health care, even a get-out-of-jail card from a powerful attorney). Another good one is intelligence, supposedly, the gift whereby the blessed ones constantly, magically come up with brilliant ideas; however, in practice it turns out that intelligent is only whoever has a buttload of money (obviously, your ideas must not have been very brilliant, if they did not make you much money), regardless of the fact, that it was actually mom and dad, who empowered the kid with all the opportunities to succeed in life. Yet, probably the best example is fake-Democracy, which we have all been indoctrinated to believe is the least worse of all political systems, because, supposedly, we all have an equal say on the government of the land; but, in reality, the way it works is, that the upper-class controlled mass-Media - always so jealous and vigilant of the utmost morality and propriety - keeps a hawk-eye on the certainly despicable political class, in order to ensure that no one ever even thinks of changing the most repugnant of all systems, where the wealthiest families amass all the opportunities to perpetuate themselves on top of everybody else.   

The question of whether a concept is formed or not is therefore more philosophical than scientific. After all, probably the most salient quality of the brain is its prodigious robustness in coping with uncertainty. Hence, we will be better able to comprehend the internal dynamics of the brain (especially when it comes to such abstract and fluid concepts as memory and knowledge), if we   refrain ourselves from thinking in clear-cut, black-and-white terms, but likewise allow the same smooth spectrum of shades of gray in our terminology. Obviously, concepts do not have any physical manifestation, and we therefore cannot speak about their existence in the same terms as we do about physical bodies. Concepts are instead abstract ideas. Now, if we consider that 'idea' is a synonym for 'concept', this explanation is not very helpful; however, we will obtain more information, if we consider that 'idea' also means a possible course of action. Indeed, a concept represents information on a possible course of action. Consequently, the degree to which a concept exists is determined by how helpful such information is.

* Consciousness will emerge as the brain extracts higher-level information on how things work and (as a form of lingua franca) a new general universal coding scheme develops, which can be generally applied to the execution of any task. Thus, we can similarly imagine conscious thinking, as the process followed by a true judge, as it goes through a legal codification system, in order to find the best way of action in response to a given situation.

The scientific approach is not to agonize ourselves over what is a concept, but how do concepts work. In that sense, what really matters to us here is that concepts code in natural language (and so spell out with words) our knowledge on how a given thing works. Furthermore, we can conceive our conscious knowledge as an encyclopedia, which, conceptually speaking, is in turn made up of two basic components: a dictionary and an all-purpose recipe book. This break-down, however, does in no way imply any physical manifestation, as there is all reason to believe, that the data is intermingled. The depiction is instead meant to signify all the information maintained by our conscious knowledge base; namely, what are all the things which exist in our world, how do they employed to represent this information. In other words, the purpose of our (conscious knowledge) Encyclopedia is to maintain a natural language record of the details on how things work; so that we may be able to apply such knowledge to attain some distant goal. Hence, given that associations are learned unconsciously and our unconscious wisdom represents how perceptual patterns relate to each other, it would be reasonable to say, that our encyclopedia is to the things in this world, what our unconscious wisdom is to perceptual patterns. Indeed, our encyclopedia  constitutes a typification layer (as a form of higher-level of abstraction software layer) sitting on top of our unconscious wisdom of perceptual-patterns associations. This 'higher-level of abstraction' edifice then sets up in turn the basis for our conscious thoughts. Indeed, in simplified terms, we can think of consciousness as the verbalization of the language and coding scheme employed by the brain to understand and code how the world works, and subsequently apply the learned knowledge to elaborate plans of action aimed at optimizing the interaction with our environment. 

In other words, Consciousness will emerge as higher-level, more abstract information on the outside world is extracted and (as a form of lingua franca) a new general universal coding scheme develops, which can be generally applied to the execution of any task. Thus, we can similarly imagine conscious thinking, as the process followed by a judge (a true judge, that is, not the kind of really repugnant individuals, who systematically take common, self-represented citizens for a ride in the crooks system of our evil and no-less repugnant fake-Democracy), as it goes through a legal codification system, in order to find the best way of action in response to a given situation. Indeed, the purpose of a codification system is to create some sort of legal edifice, where - in addition to naming and describing - all the countless situations encountered in the past are typify in standard types, akin to our consciousness' system of concepts. THe role of the true judge is then to go through all the typified scenarios and find the best match to the present case. Now, in the repugnant fake-Democracy crooks system, the judges are given ample discretion, so that the crook's ruling can be molded to conform to the Big-Man's attorney's dictate. However, in theory, not only are we all equal to the law, but the law should as well apply equally to all, regardless of one's wealth or social status. Consequently, the court's actuation should conform to what judisprudence prescribes; that is, the actuation - clean of any crook's crooked interpretation - should be what past experience has taught will yield the best results for the whole. In other words, in theory, no room is allowed to any top-down decision-making agent's discretion; but the process follows a bottom-up competition for the best-match to the present case. Nevertheless, not unlike our dear froggy pal, for all intends and purposes, a choice has been made

* How complex plans can be elaborated without any intelligent decision-making agent? (i.e. how do ideas get generated?): The pursuit of any goal can be framed as a search for the optimal sequence of actions in a game tree. Once we have formed ourselves concepts of all relevant things, everything gets stereotyped and the dimension and complexity of the problem is so very much reduced. Since - for the purpose of planning - the brain disregards the insignificant peculiarities among different instances of each concept, it is realistic to formulate a plan for a real-life problem (e.g. fighting a dialectic or physical battle, driving a system to a certain desired state, or simply finding a route from Point A to Point B) as a simple chess game. Then, since the assumption is made, that there are no significant differences among pawns, knights, bishops... the number of possible combinations to explore becomes manageable. Moreover, if we follow the (unconscious) intuition we have develop out of practice on the specific problem, we will minimize wasting energies researching unpromising combinations.

Needless to say, however, the brain's actual operation is always far more complicated than simply following a codification system. To begin with, such a "codification system" must first be learned, which is probably the hardest and most miraculous part. Moreover, very often there is not any direct mapping from our current state to a certain desired state; but a serpentine path will have to be traversed, involving a plethora of steps, and there will not be a standard recipe available to solve the problem. 

 

Exactly in order to address this specific issue, the brain evolved a new mechanism, which we can very well call reason. Yes, reason is not an intelligent decision maker; but a mechanism which developed as language empowered our brain to represent, keep a record and transmit all the information regarding how things relate to the achievement of our goals, and then employ such knowledge to elaborate complex plans. For that purpose, however, concepts first needed to be formed. As discussed in earlier sections, concepts are mental abstractions constructed by our brain, in order to code plans of action. As stated previously, consciousness will thus emerge as these building blocks become available, and (as a form of lingua franca) a new general universal coding scheme develops, which will then be generally applied to the elaboration and execution of complex plans by our reasoning and planning mechanism. It is important to understand, however, that the elaboration of these plans is a process, which not only involves our consciousness. Rather, not unlike the construction of our conceptual abstractions, significant portions of it are carried out unconsciously.

 

To illustrate this point, and by way of conclusion of all the above,we can best summarize the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain, by considering an all-complicated Chess-like game, where - aside from some very basic wired-in structures we get from birth - nothing is really known nor can be assumed. Indeed, let us imagine a Chess-like game, where all the pieces look differently, there is no indication as of how each of them behave and what rules of conduct they follow, and we even ignore that the field is organized in 64 squares and movements are restricted to these discrete positions. In fact, we are not even informed, that ultimate success will be achieved the moment we capture the opposing side's king. Rather, we will have to figure out all this knowledge through experience, as we play one game after another. The point here, with this exercise, is that the pursuit of any goal - whether this is explaining something to another person, fighting a dialectic or physical battle, driving a system to a certain desired state, or simply finding a route from Point A to Point B - can be framed as a search for the optimal sequence of actions in a game tree (as defined in combinatorial game theory). Now, the brain's job - namely driving the individual towards success in life - is, without a doubt, the most complicated and hardest of all. Indeed, - aside from some very basic wired-in conducts - we come to this world not knowing anything, let alone how to find happiness in life.

As discussed in earlier sections, either somebody teaches us how things work, or we will form ourselves our own concepts through experience, by playing with things. We will so learn, that there are actually six distinct types of pieces in the game (pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queen and king), each of these piece types has its own rules on what sort of movements it can perform, the placements of the pieces are restricted to the 64 squares on the board, etc.. Once we have form ourselves an idea of how things work, we are in a better condition to plan our moves, in order to achieve a certain goal. More often than not, however, there will not be an obvious path and it may be a good idea to break down the problem in smaller tasks, each aime at some milestone. This subdivision will be conducted consciously, by means of our conscious knowledge Encyclopedia. We may not be able to check-mate our opponent from the current position, but perhaps it is possible to capture a pawn or some other minor piece. If no easy prey can be identified, an expert chess player will at least know, that his chance to triumph will be greatly improve, if he dominates the central positions of the board. Alternatively, perhaps, from all the associations we have learned from experience, our instinct may be able to suggest some subgoal, which is likely to lead us to whatever objective we have now in mind. Who knows? our instinct may smell one of our opponent's pieces' blood in the water. In any event, all these ideas are continuously competing against each other for deeper consideration; that is, how can each of these milestones in turn be attained? We may be aware of some recipe to achieve the next subgoal, but our instinct will likewise dig into our wisdom of learned associations, looking for some suggestion. In Chess, this means considering what could be our next move. If we are instead writing an explanation, our instinct will look for the right set of words to express the current idea. Again, all the hypotheses entertained by our mind are in continuous competition against each other. Needless to say, the more practice we have accumulated and wiser we are on the specific subject, the stronger our intuition will be; that is, good suggestions will rise immediately, and little time will be wasted with unpromising alternatives before the competition is called good. Often, however, the first idea that pops up is not that convincing and we may want to look ahead a few more movements in our chess game, or scratch a little deeper in our wisdom of learned associations for a better set of words to spell out our idea. Alternatively, we may not feel like making the extra effort and instead just accept whatever we got. Needless to say, this decision is taken consciously; which, however, does not mean that it requires the existence of a decision-making agent. Rather, we can think of three factors, which may determine how to proceed: namely, how convincing is the answer found so far, how much time and energies do we have available to make an additional effort, and how feasible and how much importance do we give to the achievement of the pertinent goal. People is woefully misguided, when they say that Ph.D.'s are very smart; rather, we are just stubborn motherfuckers, who never give up until we attain a convincing solution. Finally, once we settle on a plan for the current milestone, we move on to focusing our attention on to the next, until we ultimately reach our final objective.

* Since genetic algorithms (such as Nature's survival of the fittest) are guaranteed to converge to the global optimum (if given sufficient time); the brain is guaranteed to evolve an optimum reasoning and planning mechanism, within the existing conceptual and physical constraints. 

As game theory shows, a mechanism of this kind would be able to find a path from a starting point A, to a distant and unrelated desired state B, or, in more concrete terms for our subject here, , a plan of action to achieve an arbitrary goal. Evidently, any species endowed with such a skill will enjoy an extraordinary evolutionary edge. Now, as evidenced by genetic algorithms, Nature's survival-of-the-fittest law is nothing but an incredibly powerful optimization process, especially well suited for very difficult and complicated problems, where little or no information (such as, for example, the objective function's derivatives) is available and local minima are ubiquitous. THe law is as simple as it can get: those species implementing the best strategies prevail, whereas those which do not die off and disappear. Consequently, it is safe to conclude, that the species alive at the present time are following the strategies best adapted for the environment's conditions as of yesterday. This does not mean, however, that there is a single optimal strategy. Rather, the robustness of the natural selection optimization process to local minima is due to the simple principle, according to which a species' strategy is good enough, so long it passes the test of survival. Needless to say, species based their strategies on countless possible peculiarities, such as the ability to fly, the endurance to arid terrains, incredibly reproduction rates, etc. Obviously, human beings' Chief approach has been to optimize the interaction with the world, by learning how things relate to each other. Now, whereas opposing poles come close one to another, equal poles repel each other. This is to say that, to the extent that they seek and depend on the same resources, those species occupying the same niche will fight the fiercest competition against one another. Then, yes, those which do not perform optimally, are very likely to lose and disappear sooner or later. Consequently, given that our strategy had been to optimize our interaction with our environment, - in case our own personal mental perception would not constitute sufficient evidence, we have all reasons to think that, throughout time, we evolve to exploit to the fullest our ability to learn associations between things, to the point of coming to develop and perfect a mechanism, whereby the individual would be able to elaborate some complex plan of action, leading to the attainment of some arbitrary goal. Whether we like it or not, however, given the extreme complexity of the brain, it is not at all realistic to think that, from its mere observation and study, anyone will anytime soon be able to figure out the exact details of how such complex plans of action are put together.. As a matter of fact, it is far more useful to show how it is possible to do away of the assumption of a magical decision-making agent, and, instead, a massively Parallel-and-Distributed-Processing network of neurons cooperating with, and competing against, one another could generate the appropriate sequence of actions, in order to accomplish a given goal. If a model of this sort then exhibits the same behavior as the brain and successfully predicts future observations; it would all be too much of an unbelievable coincidence, that significantly different implementations of our reasoning and planning functionalities would yield equal results. Indeed, in order to optimize our odds of accurately modeling the brain, the most effective and promising approach is to devise an optimal strategy carrying out the brain function in question.

* The exact shape of the brain's planning mechanism is constrained by the nature of the application (the mechanism has to be able to generate a plan to accomplish any goal in any kind of problem) and the brain's own physical constraints (it has to be implementable in a massively parallel and distributed neural architecture). 

As a matter of fact, the search for the nature of our reasoning and planning mechanism is, paradoxically enough, greatly simplified by the constraints the investigation is subject to. First, as any other brain function, it obviously needs to be implementable by a neural architecture. Thus, the specific algorithm should not rely on, for instance, complex mathematical operations such as derivatives, integrals, etc.; but must be restricted to simple computations. More importantly, however, no assumptions can be made on the problem to be reasoned out; but whatever goal we want to pursue, the same mechanism should be able to generate a plan to accomplish it. Now, in order to figure out a sequence of actions leading to a certain desired target, at each step along the path, one way or another, it will have to be determined what action will in turn be executed. Clearly, this is no different than conducting the sort of game-tree search outlined above. The exact details of the specific computations performed by the neurons in our brain, in order to implement such a tree search are then in actuality of no more relevance, than the exact details of the specific algorithm a smartphone may utilize in order to recognize faces.       

* Since our (natural-language coded) plans of action are in this fashion generated after exploring all reasonable combinations; we no longer need the invocation of any magic, in order to explain our miraculous ability to spell out our reasonings: why did we do this, why did we not do that, what was wrong about this, what was right about that...

THe crucial takeaway of the mechanism described above is that the generated sequence of actions opens the door to many fascinating opportunities. Obviously, it is the availability of this sequence what will make it possible to trace back our steps and analyze in detail, which were the keys of the successful outcome, or, alternatively, where is that things started going down the drain. To the degree that there was any rationale behind the selection of a given action along the way, not only will we be able to explain why such choice was made, but we could also tell why other alternatives were discarded. As a logical consequence of this, we can now put ourselves into our opponent's shoes and likewise argue, what is wrong about what he or she said or did. Yes, since there is a sequence of actions describing in natural language all the series of steps, that have to be followed in order to attain a certain goal; our miraculous ability to spell out our reasonings, all of a sudden, does no longer need the invocation of any magic.