The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) by Ray Mazza

limbs and her brain. She has a brain.”
    “Huh? She has blood? And a brain?” said Trevor. “What algorithm are you using to simulate the brain?”
    “I know this is difficult to comprehend,” said Damon. “I said before that you needed to be ready for a paradigm shift. Well, here it is. We aren’t using any special algorithm for the brain. Not neural networks, not pattern recognition, not distributed AI. Not Bayesian networks. Not swarm intelligence. None of these or any other artificial approaches to approximating the functions of the human brain. The brain we are simulating is not an approximation. Neither is any other part of her. It’s all real .”
    “How can it be real if it’s all in a computer? Nobody can construct a brain in a computer program, let alone an entire living thing. It’s impossible. There are countless reasons why it can’t be done. If we don’t know how it all works, it can’t be built, and there are plenty of things we don’t yet understand about the human brain.”
    Damon considered this for a moment. “John Maynard Keynes once said, ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.’  He spoke an eternal truth. The people that would consider this impossible just aren’t thinking about the problem from the right perspective,” said Damon. “Look at that tree over there.” He pointed to a bigleaf maple, easily the largest tree in his yard. It stretched over sixty feet up, massive branches reaching in every direction.
    “That huge one?”
    “Yes. If I told you that I wanted you to construct a tree just like that out of raw materials, and you could have the help of all the scientists you wanted, what would you say?”
    “I’d say I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Trevor. How would he just put a tree together out of raw materials? How do you make a leaf from elements and minerals? How do you make bark, xylem, phloem? How do you make cells?
    “It sounds impossible. You’d have to make all the different parts of the tree, and you have to make a lot of them because the tree is so large. But its size doesn’t even matter, because making its parts sounds impossible anyway.”
    “Ah, but wait,” said Damon. “Do you think I planted that tree there, just like that?”
    Trevor was beginning to feel like an idiot again. It seemed to be a recent trend for him. “No. It’s huge. If you wanted a tree that big, you’d have to plant a smaller tree and let it grow... bigger...”
    “Right,” said Damon, getting visibly excited. “Now, you said the size of the tree doesn’t matter. What if I asked you to make me a sapling out of raw materials, then you could let it grow to that size. Would you feel any better?”
    Even though making the individual parts would be just as impossible, somehow the hypothetical task seemed less daunting. “I guess I would feel better about that. Not much though.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because,” Trevor explained, “You would still have to understand the intricacies of all the portions of a tree.” After listing off the anatomy of a plant, his mind did a double-take of sorts, and then he understood where this was going. “But…” said Trevor, “But! If you asked me to construct the seed for a tree out of raw materials, the task, although still impossible, would seem much less so. Then you grow a tree from that seed.”
    “Yes!” Damon nearly leapt out of his seat. “And?”
    “And you can apply that approach to other organisms, such as humans…. So instead of having to create algorithms that horribly approximate the way humans think, and instead of overcoming the innumerable impossibilities related to creating exact simulations of each piece of the human anatomy one piece at a time, you can start with a seed and let it grow from there!” Trevor had now gotten up and was pacing, his gaze fixed as he stared through the ground into the womb of the earth.
    “So instead of hundreds of