Stars

    When Isaac Newton wrote about the Universal Gravitation Law, he step in the shoulders of giants who looked at the stars. Somehow, he was able to find a pattern there that explained how the attraction of two bodies in space occurs, an interaction law to describe a behavior, even though he failed to explain why. Curiously, the laws of gravitation, electrostatic attraction (Coulomb), and magnetic pole attraction force have the same shape, the product of two properties with a constant divided by the squared distance. Often I wonder if the later ones could be understood without the model of the first one.

    In that regard I wonder what could have happened if instead of considering celestial bodies, scientist had focused their efforts in small objects here on Earth. Rocks, boulders, iron balls, you name it. Could it have been possible to propose the object gravitational attraction model with such small objects? Sometimes I think that this kind of discoveries were made because we are able to look at the stars.

    How is all that related with the mind and the cognitive process of language? Well, maybe it is not at all! However, sometimes I think that all those research on neurons, ANN, and brains (artificial or living, matters the same) to solve the AI problem is just trying to get gravitation law out of watching rocks and boulders (no offense to geologists). What if understanding how cognitive processes work requires going macro and study society instead of isolated individuals or just neurons. In the end, the only reason mankind evolved intelligence is because humans needed to communicate among them, because humans are social beings. Despite all bright ideas are born by introspection in the sacred cloister of a privileged mind, that mind requires previous interaction (namely, communication) with other information sources, and all discovery is futile if it is not transmitted. Therefore, interaction, communication, and isolation seem to be necessary for intelligence to emerge, and such patterns, those interaction laws between sentient bodies can only be observed in large systems.

    Maybe we need to take our eyes out of the screen and look again to the stars.