I think there’s no doubt that if our species soldiers on long enough that we’ll eventually solve consciousness, we’ll understand how the brain–that mysterious organ–works. It’s a monumental, unsolvable problem until it isn’t anymore.

The question is how we’ll arrive at that knowledge, whether it will be by figuring out the process theoretically or by collecting data and putting together the granular pieces. In “How the Brain Is Computing the Mind,” an Edge piece, Ed Boyden, MIT neuroengineer, opts for the latter strategy.

An excerpt:

The approach I would like to take is to go get the data. Let’s see how the cells in the brain can communicate with each other. Let’s see how these networks take sensation and combine that information with feelings and memories and so forth to generate the outputs, decisions and thoughts and movements. And then, one of two possibilities will emerge.

One will be that patterns can be found, motifs can be mined, you can start to see sense in this morass of data. The second might be that it’s incomprehensible, that the brain is this enormous bag of tricks and while you can simulate it brute force in a computer, it’s very hard to extract simpler representations from those datasets.                 

In some ways, it has to be the former because it’s strange that we can predict our behaviors. People walk through a city, they communicate, they see things, there are commonalities in the human experience. So that’s a clue; that’s a clue that it’s not an arbitrary morass of complexity that we’re not going to ever make sense of. Of course, being a pessimist, we should still always hold open the possibility that it will be incomprehensible. But the fact that we can talk in language, that we see and design shapes and that people can experience pleasure in common, that suggests that there is some convergence that it’s not going to be infinitely complex and that we will be able to make sense of it.•