It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
-- Mark Twain So far, most of the posts in this blog have been focused on building a 'bottom-up' understanding of how the brain works - from how DNA works up to how individual neurons work. Lots of good science to base all of this stuff on. It is difficult to go further 'up the stack' in this way, however. How do neurons work together to do useful things? How are small-scale networks of neurons structured and how do the neurons interact in order for us to do simple things like rhythmically tap a finger? Are we there yet? Every decade or two the scientific community gets wildly optimistic that we will be able to fully understand how cognition works and be able to replicate the process in some non-biological system. It's been named many things over the years - cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, cognitive computing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence for a nice overview). And yet, with all of the mon...