2)  WHY PUZZLES?

Why is this blog called “Wilder Puzzles”?

Note:  This posting was done when my website was called "Wilder Puzzles", but now it is "Metashifting".   If you Google "Wilder Puzzles", you will get a puzzle maker, and I didn't want the confusion, so changed the site name.  I should have checked Google first.  Anyway, the following still applies to what I am thinking.

Because that is what the brain does—work puzzles. We start out from no knowledge of a subject, collect clues, and figure out a story, a hypothesis. Then we test the story against reality and see if it fits, or does it need modifying? In this way we build up a theory about the subject that becomes useful in predicting the future.

This is also called “the scientific method”, except that a scientist will also publish the theory and let other scientists see if they can repeat the tests and apply the theory successfully.

The latest information about how the brain works is just this. The brain scientists have known for a long time that there are localized sections of the brain that are used for specific purposes, like vision and other senses and face recognition, etc.

But the new information is that in most parts of the brain, the neurons are identical and the organization of the neurons the same. What is different in each section, and within a section too, are the connections between the neurons. Some are genetic, the base connections passed down from the parents, but after that the connections are added, deleted, and strengthened, by experience. That’s what a baby is doing, and on through the rest of life.

One of the best methods of artificial intelligence, AI, is just this, to start only with an empty set of software or hardware “neurons”, and then feed in data, preferably “big data”, lots of it. This “brain” is given a set of sensory information and the result, then more and more, letting the connections strengthen and weaken until the system has figured out the best way to take in new sense information and come up with the correct result. It is better in a lot of cases to do this than it is to program if/then inputs and the results. In other words, this process can figure out more subtle reasoning than we can give it.

So “puzzles”. That is what I have attempted to do all my life, to figure out how things work. I am still doing it, making adjustments to my theories where necessary. And I hadn’t thought about this until just now, but I guess this blog is an attempt to publish my theories and see if others can get the same results that I do.