Emotional Theory of Rationality

Do you love somebody? are you sure? What if I ask you to scientifically demonstrate it with no space for any doubt?

Human thinking and behavior are the basement upon which societies are built. All the complex, altruistic or conflict dynamics are initially born in the mind of a single person, and those seeds are later shared, improved, extended or "contagious". It doesn't matter if it is the Mother Theresa of Calcuta or Putin, are individual minds that, for good or for bad, switch the flame of something new on.

But today, and due to technical and knowledge limitations, we are not able to understand, much less to explain human mind. The three main reasons are: 

- We don't know the structure nor the dynamics of the simplest living brain, - - Our technology cannot capture ALL the information being processed in a living brain (except some very simple organisms which have transparent brains)

- every living brain is unique, so it is not enough understanding just one.

That said, we have found a way to scientifically access a "complementary" knowledge to functionally explain human thinking and behavior. That knowledge is the foundation upon which we are now, at THE MINDKIND, developing human-level Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. That knowledge is letting us develop what it is supposed cannot be developed.

But our technological project was not born as such; it was started as a humanistic and people development project, trying to teach people how to use nature as a well-being tool. We spent 15 years and almost all our funds making basic research in neuroscience and developing training contents to improve people skills. We did it, but environment was not propitious (economic crisis), so we pivoted into AI tech field. Now, and parallely with our AGI R+D line, we think we can add to people improvement, explaining at a functional level how our brain works and how we can manage it to improve ourselves and our relationships with others, whether at a personal, social or working levels.

A better understanding of our mental dynamics will give us an opportunity to reduce biased thinking, improving collaboration, reducing conflicts, enhancing empathy and communication, developing self-awareness and personal growth, with collateral effect in nature conservation and impulsing circular economy.

Imagine that you are an adolescent between 14 and 18 and I propose you to make a no-code training course in AI and robotics programming. While trying to get the robot programmed to achieve some given goal, eventually you'll find that you need to add some "functional" elements to solve the arising challenges you find towards your target. Every time one of those functional elements are incorporated, a short training pill relates them with your own brain, mind and behavior, making a functional link between them to better  understand how and why biology has solved that "function". That way, as you go on solving the robot challenges, you are getting aware of your own brain dynamics and functional elements and the reason for they to exist. At every stage of the training program, some related examples are used to exemplify how the topics and learnt contents get into action in real-life situations, and what strategies and variables you can manage to improve yourself.

This is one example of how our contents can be "packaged" within different training courses (depending on the target population) to, indirectly, get them skilled with a better knowledge.

We have that knowledge, but need to run a R+D project to explore how to adapt it to different strategies to reach different targets.

Suicide has become the most prevalent cause of dead below 30. Most western societies have deep mental health troubles with addictions, anxiety, depression, drugs consumption, eating disorders, violence, etc...

There are not enough mental health resources to give support to all of them. That said, prevention is the only way to reduce the demand for such resources, thus allowing to extend their scope to focus on those people that actually have no capacity to front their challenges alone.

Our proposal can be differentialy targeted to children, adolescents, young adults, adults and elders, schools with fathers and teachers, working environments at different responsibility levels, etc...

For each of them, different training proposals can be developed to maximize the scope and the adherence to programs.

Even more, if well designed, every trained person can become a diffusion "vector" him/her-self, thus maximizing the impact on every community, gradually scaling the possibility for people to access that knowledge.

Currently we are an AI tech startup with a 7 people multidisciplinary team formed by engineers, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists and VR developers. 

Our way to make R+D is a "Transdisciplinary" approach, that is, we face some given scientific challenge by taking different specialized knowledge, abstracting it to a conceptual level and looking for functional similarities to solve a problem in a different and supposedly unrelated field. For example, we explore how to automatically identify elements in an image by using immune system functionality to recognize antigens.

If we find the way, we'll increase our R+D team with new profiles (eg. pedagogues, psychologists, psychiatrists,...) focused on this complementary training/educational line, but following a similar transdisciplinary approach that has already been so useful.

Since 2005, some previous training contents have been diffused as a previous business project called DAXNATUR. It was a company focused on training course for adults to try to teach people how to use nature as a well-being tool. The economic crisis in 2008 closed the market, so that project was not able to become fully self-sustained, being abandoned in 2019, what eventually give place in 2020 to pivot and try to use the accumulated scientific knowledge to solve the AGI challenge, thus creating The Mindkind.

Despite those difficulties, the training contents have been repeatedly teached along 2005 - 2019 period, becoming good enough as a pilot for this new project.

Developing Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is scientifically and technically challenging itself, being one of the most ambitious goals for every tech company in the field. It is the Holy Grail.

But, though it is incredibly motivating, it doesn't give us the feeling of being actually helping nobody, but ourselves. That's not enough. 

Our personal need to try to improve our society will be better covered if we make use of our technical and scientific knowledge to also create an opportunity for people to better understand themselves, thus having a chance to solve some of those real mental health problems societies are now facing.

We have already applied to different programs (Bill & Melinda Gates, McArthur Foundation, Dana-Foundation, etc...), but maybe communicating our project is not our one of our better skills.

Today, it is not scientifically or technically possible to fully capture a "subjective" experience in all its complexity. Simply, we don't have the knowledge to achieve it. The only way to access to somebody "subjective" experiences is by listening her/him, wit all the existing limitations.

Thus, only the person which is experiencing the subjective experience actually knows how it "feels", what's really "appearing" within his/her consciousness, how thoughts go running from one to another and so on. It is even more complex when those life-experiences are extremely intense, like getting intensely happy or loosing a beloved.

Well, thanks to an incredible opportunity, we had access to almost 30 years of scientifically analyzed extreme life-experiences, both positive an negative, which gave us access to some knowledge that, due to previously exposed reasons, cannot be found elsewhere, it doesn't matter how much money or resources you could have (it is our competitive advantage to face big-techs)

They are in the heart of our scientific research and set the foundations for our AGI Cognitive Architecture.

That knowledge let us developed the training contents previously mentioned and gives us the confidence to apply to this program.

Our proposal sets a new and alternative foundation to explain emotion-cognition interaction and how and why it is the way it is. Having a new approach to try to improve our knowledge about that dynamics can have a profound impact on people's mental health and skills development. Our societies have a real problem with mental health and every grain of sand counts. Maybe our proposal can be wrong, but our motivation isn't. We actually think we can add to find a solution for that challenge, but we cannot do it alone.

This is one of the challenges we have to face within this program, how to measure the improvement got with our training courses compared with some alternative ones. This is part of the R+D phase to adapt contents and develop KPIs to evaluate them and their impact on population.

Currently we have not explored this topic, as it has not yet become a real action line, yet.

We are following a synergistic strategy, going from neuroscience to AGI technology and machine behavior but, in the pathway towards that goal, we are finding new knowledge that, eventually, can add to neuroscience and psychology fields, opening new approaches to better understand how and why brain and behavior really work as they do.

In that sense, programming an AGI Cognitive Architecture forces us to down to ground some elusive concepts and relationships we had only explored theoretically. How do you program "self-esteem"? Our scientific and technological exploration of ETR Model to build an AGI upon it is giving us new feedback perspectives in an iterative exploration R+D process.

That new knowledge can be fully incorporated into educational contents, lowering the complexity and making them more conceptual.

Related with already existing training contents, we know they work because, the person who provide us with experiential knowledge to develop the ETR scientific model, is alive and have a well balanced and happy life.

Related with AGI, actually we don't know yet. We are still in a R+D phase (60%), so we had no opportunity to check it actually works. We do know all the learning we are actually extracting from that R+D process.

Our inner team:

- 1 full-time PhD Neurobiologist (CSO)

- 2 full-time Electronic and AI engineers (CTO and CTRO)

- 1 full-time physicits-mathematician for models formalization

- 1 full-time psychologist for AGI behavioral analysis

- 1 full-time VR and videogame senior developer

- 1 part-time PhD Sociologist (co-founder)

- 1 full-time CEO (Founder, project manager, Business, Neuroscientist and Computer scientist)

Contractors teams:

- 1 Part-time Senior TIC and cybersecurity manager

- 3 Part-time software engineers (Back-end, front-end and Devops)

- 1 Part-time mathematician for model formalization and optimization

- 1 Part-time project manager

- 1 Part-time Philologist and computer scientist

From 2005 to 2019: CEO Mario Garcés run the neuroscientific research to set the ETR Model. Along this time the training contents have been developed and limitedly diffused in-company and open courses.

2020-2022: CEO Mario Garcés, together with the ITAINNOVA, tested the solidity of the scientific and technical background to face AGI's development.

2022-present: R+D project to convert the functional ETR Model into a Cognitive Architecture and a first implementation of the architecture and a test environment to check for its capacities.

We takes gender equality and balance within our statutes seriously. We have performed an analysis of gender equality within the ICT and Neuroscience sectors. The ICT sector is made up mostly of male professionals, reflected by the difficulty in recruiting women. According to the UN Organization for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (Feb 2019 report), only 25% of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers) are women and a similar percentage moves to the labor market. Today, only 28% of researchers worldwide are women, and numerous studies (Institute Statistics), have found that women in STEM fields publish less, are paid less for their research, and do not progress as much in their careers as men. According to the Spanish Society of Neuroscience, the gap is evident both at an academic level and at a professional level where the differences are more notable; greater presence of men in the preparation of reports, in positions of the technical commissions for the evaluation of aid to R&D+i projects, in job interviews in private companies (higher differences for women with children) and in the awarding of prizes. Despite this situation, We are committed to gender equality and incorporates female technical profiles. One of the 2 co-founders is a woman, and ~50% of personnel are women, and 50% of leaders are women. This is also important to avoid gender bias within the ETR as the work of these personnel is crucial to set-up the base of the cognitive architecture. Although the company is not required to have an Equality Plan, it has performed one plan that includes the following measures: 1. Equal opportunities and treatment between women and men, in relation to access to employment, training, professional promotion, as well as working conditions; 2. Effective reconciliation of work, personal and family life; 3. Transparent communication with a gender perspective; 4. Commitment to display the contribution of women researchers to the project.

As training courses are a collateral line, fruit of looking to apply scientific and technical discoveries to improve our society, we will follow a B2C model, where schools and companies will be our first commercial targets, providing them with "training for trainers", thus trying to maximize our impact on the focused environment.

We will follow an on-site, blended and online balanced methodologies to maximize the geographical scope of our courses.

We are yet an AGI R+D  startup, currently supported by founders self-funding (680.000€), public R+D grants (580.000€) and public loans(323.000€).

We will look for grants to cover the R+D phase for adapting and implementing the training courses, but once saved that process, institutions and maybe public funding should cover the total costs and a small commercial margin for the courses. As I previously said, our main business focus is commercializing our AGI technology, while training courses will be a kind of social action to maximize the scope of our scientific discoveries adding to our society.