This blog has to start somewhere and as many writers suggest, you start at the beginning.
The biology of consciousness is that beginning for me. The concept is double-edged because intellectual honesty demands not just a knowledge base to build, but a place to build.
You see, there was a dream I had a long time ago. It was a couple years after I had earned my degree in Psychobiology from SUNY Purchase. In the dream there was this beautifully built foundation for a house. All the concrete walls and interior walls of concrete had been precisely laid in the ground. It was ready for the superstructure for habitation. But I walked away. I abandoned it. It’s been over 40 years. But the foundation is still there and surprisingly strong.
Along the way, additional skills for building were learned, additional ideas about design developed in me. It hasn’t produced any solutions yet. But I try.
This blog is a long overdue starting point for pulling together so many other things I have done over the years. If I had to put one word to all this work, it has to be innovation.
Frankly, too much of it has been following, reporting and analyzing the innovations of others. They call it market research. An important pursuit, yes, but it also becomes the pursuit of a Walter Mitty, a wannabe.
That is especially true in my case. I have yet to meet a person who gets as fundamentally excited as I do at research breakthroughs. I can feel my breathing change, I can feel my heart beating faster. I have to come to terms with this being who I am however strange it may seem to others.
At its heart is a war with ignorance, which also means a war with myself. Ignorance is something with which you can never make peace. If your knowledge is reduced to the level of “opinions” in the Aristotelian sense, well the struggle continues knowing you will never have all the truth. This itch can’t scratch itself. So be it.
That foundation in the dream is also for the purpose of dealing with self-ignorance. Yeah, it helps. Anyway, since then, the journey has taken huge twists and turns.
Something in me keeps coming back to this short list: 1) The hard sciences, 2) Business and management, 3) Investing. Coupled with working on myself to be a better person, this becomes my planetary system, constantly journeying from one to the next like some kind of intellectual gypsy or restless spirit. So, this blog is captive to multiple purposes; but limited by my lack of skill and experience with pretty much any platform technology. Expect frustration as a part of progress.
Still, stay tuned folks. I have a lot of irons in the fire, as usual. There is my book on innovation still in the works. Like any good idea, it turns out to be a lot harder to do than expected. To date, the manuscript is around 50 pages and the supporting notes are over 300 pages. I still have tons of print outs to read and digest, along with numerous books. This blog gets to be yet another quasi-serialized outlet of the process for getting this book done.
It is a gamble that only a psychobio kinda guy could have come up with for a topic in innovation. Today’s search topic is going to be “neuromorphic evolutionary algorithms.” I am still struggling with the idea of “computational surfaces.” There are practical previous examples, but I am fishing around for something more.
Nature is a problem solver. That is another way of thinking about evolution. Pick any species and you can find examples where speciation required the emergence of new biological functions. The remapping of genotype functions to produce the right phenotype is Nature’s fundamental problem-solving strategy. However, there are unanswered questions about related strategies Nature might use. Evolution works in such a wide range of time frames that there is an equally wide range of ways in which these new functions can develop.
For example, we are still chasing down references relating to the idea that there can be various selective constraints on mutation such that the simple notion of random mutation would only be a special case in evolution. So, we should be reporting out on that soon.
