Let us play with the idea that we are assisting God (or evolution) in creating the World. We are a subcontractor, and our task is to design the brain. We must consider several constraints. The brain we design, to mention a few major items, must
be governed by the available laws of nature
use the available (living and non-living) matter
be compatible with the objects to be controlled
control biological objects
be as powerful and energy efficient as possible
be inexpensive (both its creation and operation)
elaborate protocols to work with unreliable components
apply tricks to overcome the inherently slow operation of its components
process (encode, transmit, decode, store) information
cope with harsh environmental conditions
adapt to changes in the environment and in its own components
Two other subcontractors were already working on creating the World. They have conducted a ”feasibility study” and elaborated the necessary laws (including their mathematical formalism) for their field. They have the right and freedom to simplify and elaborate on the implementation details, provided that the principles of cooperation among the parts are not violated. They are self-consistent within their field and do not conflict with the first principles of nature. Given that the task was challenging and the general laws complex, the group subcontracted to deal with non-living matter, made simplifications (approximations and abstractions) and worked out their own laws (today we know that work as laws of non-living nature); sometimes only implicitly adding that their laws are simplified ones and are consistently valid only to the field of that group’s activity. With those simplifications, they achieved success in their field, though they sometimes had to revisit them. In those cases, new science disciplines were born, such as discovering the non-independence of space, time, and mass, which led to the theories of relativity, or discovering the relations between the continuous and discrete descriptions of nature in thermodynamics and quantum theory.
When, somewhat later, the second group subcontracted for creating laws of living matter, they were allowed (and obliged) to use the product of the first group. They wanted to take a flying start, and they took over those simplifications (the simplified laws describing non-living matter), saying that those simplifications were proven successful for the other group; instead of deriving their specific simplifications for their specific field, the living matter. Initially, they were successful; the minor discrepancies were attributed to their inexperience. As the discrepancies started to grow, the second subcontractor started to claim that the laws describing non-living matter are not valid for living matter, without discovering which other laws describe living matter. Our approach to that problem is that we scrutinize the interactions and describe their effects in a non-disciplinary way.
The third working group started to work when the second group already had some significant achievements, and aimed to organize the cooperation of units based on the principles of living matter, in two stages. Of course, they were allowed (and obliged) to use the products of the second group when creating resources and operating principles of the network of living matter organized into biological units. Although the original goal was only to concentrate the work of specific goal-oriented groups of units for survival, the method (called neural computing) developed by the group was so successful that a higher-level unit coordinating the lower-level coordinating units has been created. Of course, it inherited the laws developed for the former levels. As the operating complexity of that latter unit (called the brain) grew, again higher-level functionality appeared (called the mind) that is again based on the inherited lower-level laws. That means, to understand the high-level functionalities, one needs a very accurate understanding of the elementary neuronal operations, which has the precondition of understanding life itself. (We just mentioned a fourth working group of increasing importance. After that the performance of technical computing, due to physical and technological reasons, to enhance the energy and computing efficiency of technical computing systems, a growing interest appeared toward borrowing concepts of biological computing.)
The best approach to the problem of describing life by science was given by E. Schrödinger [12], by saying that the fundamental principles must be the same, but the ’ordinary’ laws of science we derived for non-living matter might differ from the ’non-ordinary’ laws of science describing living matter. He expressed his firm scientific conviction and commitment that (by using different approximations) we can derive those laws based on science, despite that the ”construction” of living matter needs different approaches. In other words, the general laws of nature (”the first principles”) behind the simplified laws derived as approximations describing ”non-living matter” and the ones describing ”living matter” differ only in the approximations they use. This way, the ’ordinary’ and ’non-ordinary’ laws, together, describe nature; among others, they describe life.
We point out that when we map the formal laws of non-living matter onto living matter, we do so outside their range of validity. Instead, in some cases, we must derive special approximations valid for living matter, and derive the appropriate laws for those abstractions. We derive the correct laws (valid for living matter), which –according to Schrödinger’s expectation– are ’non-ordinary’ in the sense that their form and range of validity differ from the ’ordinary’ ones we use in classic science. The general laws of nature are universal; their simplified ones can be disciplinary. However, ”nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.” (Richard P. Feynman) We know that nature is infinitely complex, all science disciplines apply approximations, and use mathematics to describe that simplified nature. To ”design” neuronal operation, we must consider and coordinate all related disciplines. They are not contradicting each other, but some of their fundamental considerations may prove to be oversimplifications when the respective discipline must cooperate. It also brings to light that we need to invent new pieces of mathematics.
In this section, we assume that, in addition to the well-known ’ordinary laws, those ’non-ordinary’ laws exist (we will derive them in Chapter 2 given that they may belong to different scientific disciplines), and we derive the abstract rules that enable neuronal cooperation. We describe the known (and more or less understood) static components, the recently discovered (but not yet integrated) ones, furthermore the dynamic components and processes needed for the observed operation, but remained hidden by the testing methods.