Chapter 9: A Rhetoric on Heuristics of Life

Often I feel like I have a mental stature of a newly born. I come up with stuff which upon announcing to the world, I'm told that it ain't anything new.. Everybody knows that.. Yet again here I jump into another one of my literary journeys, armed with naivety, full of enthusiasm, and an old sack of english. Fully aware that maybe the result is nothing more than just a fresh déjàvu...

I wonder sometimes about the similarities that are inherent in various aspects of life which might otherwise be thought of as apples and oranges... Meaning, cannot be compared. Here I am trying to compare a river, a living organism and the human brain.

Tracing time back to a point when some water accumulates at a certain mountain. Let's observe how the events might slowly unfold. Just a few seconds before the start of events in question, the ground around it has a very irregular surface. Rocks, crevices, mountains etc etc. Let's let the clock to start ticking away. The water slowly overflows from its source, slowly taking the route that's easiest and least troublesome. This continues until it reaches the sea. Also, through its journey, it keeps modifying its course in order to get to a stable state. Thus the river comes to being as an entity. The river can be thought as the output of change ie, the water flow brought about to the template ie, the ground. In course of time, the resultant entity gets its unique identity based on the amount of change stand the basic structure. 

Now let's look at any living organism. Most of them start off their life with a very similar pattern. Much like the ground around the water source in the earlier example. Slowly as time passes, the template of an entity gains rest of its unique features based on the conditions... Temperature, etc etc similar to the water conditions for the river.. And the difference in the beginning template like the terrain in the case of the river.

MS(If you are not familiar with this abbreviation, i would use them going forward as a “Mid script" to warn any potential readers of the dangers ahead): Before proceeding further, you should take a deep breath. Ask your self if anymore of the similar content as above might kill you. If yes, consider not reading the rest. If no, know that "what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger"..

Now the third comparison that I promised... The brain. Again.. The brain when it's just formed, starts off with a pretty similar pattern/template. Now it can be visualized as a web. An intelligent web which refines itself as and when the stimuli gets fed in. These could be the sense of touch, sight etc... Each time the same input goes in, the web refines itself trying to eventually get into a steady state but it never does. Much like an ever changing course of a river even when the flow is steady. What i am trying to say is that the intelligence may not be just a characteristic of brain but the internal mutation of the template.. how it learns etc. For example, evolution. How certain animals decided to mutate into something a bit more suited for the conditions around it. 

Any entity has a building block which has a logic sewed into it which serves two basic purposes… One is defining a degree of self mutation. The other is the distinct characteristic that is developed overtime with varying inputs. An example of the latter would be, a tree that curves itself around another tree to get better light. Another base function that the logic has is to assess the result of the self mutation. I reckon that if apple trees are grown in a controlled environment where they get enough light only with altitude, the next generation of those trees would be inherently slightly taller! Look at the coniferous forests. How may they have to come to be? Maybe they were a bit too tired about the weight of snow that they adapted slowly to avoid the snow from latching on to them. So you see, the intelligence is not only an aspect of the brain. You have Integrated intelligence which makes any living thing what it is, and sometimes you have dedicated self assessment units like the brain in some. Both works on the same criteria of adaptation. My theory on why this distinction was brought to being or why a brain was created is that the at some point, the self assessment logic figured that hey, i need a drastic change but if i change my integrated logic, its affecting me in a bad way. Thus, let me separate out a few trivial logic functions into a separate part which modifies faster than the others which are integrated. 

Talking about one worldly concept that always made me think, i believe that repeating a certain input ensures a slight consistence in the output. This would also be known as Practice. Practice doesn't make a man perfect.. It only makes him consistent. Much like a river that has found its course. Years of floods would ensure the river would get more and more predictable.. Much like the predictable honey bee that starts its day looking for flowers and returning to the hive etc. Much like the kid who always says 4+2 is 6.

We could learn a lot from the nature's way of doing things. If the template for a river is the rugged surface of earth, the template for a life form could be the DNA. A self modifying network could be the basis for a pretty humanbrain-like AI. I only started with a river in this case, but i guess with a careful study, a similar pattern could be identified on a much bigger scale.