Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: A Concise Introduction
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• PART I - Neuronal Noise
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• Chapter 2: Characterization of Synaptic Noise
• Chapter 3: Computational and Mathematical Models of Synaptic Noise
• Chapter 4: Integrative Properties in the Presence of Synaptic Noise
• Chapter 5: Analyzing Synaptic Noise
• Chapter 6: Recreating Synaptic Noise Using Dynamic-Clamp
• Chapter 7: Synaptic Noise in Activated States and the Awake Animal
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• PART II - Neuronal Models for Large-Scale Simulations
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• Chapter 8: Neuronal Simulation Strategies: Differences and Limitations
• Chapter 9: The gIF Neuronal Models
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• PART III - Towards a New Science of the Brain
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• Chapter 10: The Complex Brain
• Chapter 11: A Mathematical Take on a Complex Dynamical System: The Verhulst Logistic Map
• Chapter 12: Operator Graph Theory: A Physicist's Approach to the Mathematics of Finite Graphs
• Chapter 13: Graph-Theoretical Analysis of Biological Neural Networks
• Chapter 14: Instead of a Comprehensive Summary: A Glimpse into the Future

Excerpt from the Afterword: Instead of an Afterword: A Declaration of War

Nullius in Verba, "on no man's word". The suitably cautionary yet minimalist perspicuous motto of the Royal Society of London, inspired by Horace's Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, "not bound to swear by the words of any master", encapsulates in an almost perennial sense what constitutes the core of the scientific method. More than 30 years ago, I absorbed this phrase like a child a new toy, building on its words the mere foundation of what soon after became my path into science.

Not bound to swear by the words of any master. Any master!

To the ideal of science which grew on this foundation I cling on ever since, like the nightly sky to its stars, the ideal of absolute freedom, the power to transcend the limitations inscribed onto the human condition, the ability to enter the Unknown in search for the only things which truly matter, knowledge, truth and honesty. As scientists we never give up being children, innocent and free of limiting constraints, playfully joggling with the laws of nature which brought us into Being and allow us, want us, to explore, discover, understand. Douglas Adams put it this way: "But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting." (Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish").

The reality I experienced, however, proved very much different to my ideal of what it means to be a scientist, what it means to do science. Approaching the end of the first half of my professional career, I must look back, almost regretfully, to periods of disappointment, anger and depression, which were almost solely caused and fueled by the disparity between my deeply inscribed ideal and the experienced reality. Sure, an ideal by its mere definition is nothing more than something satisfying one's conception of what is perfect, an abstract or hypothetical optimum which exists only in the imagination and is not likely to become, or to be, part of objective reality. Nevertheless, I hold on to the believe that it is this following of ideals that droves and drives great human endeavors, that it is the attempt of realizing one's ideals that allows us, enables us, to leave a mark in the book of history, ideals with which great minds achieved great things, or caused indescribable suffering.

My childhood was filled with the works of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Riemann, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, to name but a few. Alone the mere uttering of words like "prime numbers" or "relativity" caused a cold rush down my spine, ending in goosebumps of passionate excitement all over my skin. It still does, but I cannot help but wonder where all those Galileos, Einsteins, Riemanns are now.

With a world becoming smaller and smaller with each day, with modern technology, en par with Gutenberg's revolution some 600 years ago, driving an easier access to knowledge for everyone, the decades passed since my childhood remain inexplicably devoid of scientific heroes whose works inspire not just scientific progress, but fuel whole shifts in paradigms which reshape like an earthquake the landscape of science, opening new grounds where generations of scientists can build on and play freely. In a sad reflection of reality, I must agree with the "troublemaker" Lee Smolin ("The Trouble With Physics"), and, perhaps arrogantly, even extend his assessment of actuality beyond the field of theoretical physics.

Is it, maybe, that we are at the end of the road, reached the limit of what the human mind can observe, perceive and, more importantly, understand? If so, then the decision I've made some 30 years ago was a fatally wrong one, not just for me. If this is the end of what the Universe allows us to achieve, then I am afraid human civilization itself is doomed to disappear unnoticed in the eternal and irreversible stream of time.

No, I cannot, and will not, believe that!

Thus, for the sole purpose of self-preservation, I, we all, must ask what happened to the ideal of science, to the idea of what it means being a scientist, explorer, discoverer? Perhaps surprisingly, a hint to an answer is plainly presenting itself in front of our very eyes. It is we!

In the past two decades, I first-handedly witnessed young people reaching a high academic degree without knowing the very basics in their respective fields, by consciously cheating, by acting as mere intermediaries between scientific teams without contributing anything remotely substantial to the fields in question, or by mere flattering their supervisors, thus not just diminishing the high honour which once accompanied a doctoral degree, but severely damaging the public opinion about generations of hard-working scientists and their achievements. I first-handedly witnessed established scientists misusing their, in trust given, power to deflect, distort or plainly reject other scientist's work to ensure the preservation of their own, in many cases minor, contributions to the building of scientific knowledge, thus irreversibly damaging the very ethical foundations on which science itself is build on.

It appears to me that with all the "progress", or shall we rather say "regress", in the quality of higher education, new loopholes appeared which allow some black sheep to bypass the unwritten yet agreed-upon ethical core of our scientific family, a core which was established by countless generations of true scientists and guided us for millennia, demonstrating time and time again the superiority of the scientific method over systems of believe and superstition, thus single-handedly driving the objective progress of human society. What surprises me is that the academic embedding of these few black sheep is en par with, in some cases even higher than, that of the many genuine scientists who dedicated their lives, in many cases with unimaginable personal sacrifices, hunting for objective truth, irrespective how unpleasant, challenging and disturbing it is.

Even worse, it is we who allowed and allow these black sheep into our herd, spoiling and diminishing with each new addition the ideal of what science stood for, is, and must always stand for. Lee Smolin writes: "But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders." (Lee Smolin, "The Trouble With Physics"). It is us who allow these bad leaders, these black sheep, to thrive!

But this is only the most obvious, the plainly visible indication of what is wrong with science at this very moment in history. The truth goes deeper and is far more frightening. Over the past 50 years, we were slowly made slaves of materialist values and the believe that all what matters are profitable applications. Steven Weinberg, one of the last true seers and heroes in the field of theoretical physics, said "It does not help that some politicians and journalists assume the public is interested only in those aspects of science that promise immediate practical applications to technology or medicine." But that is what we see emerging, or in some fields already flourishing, all around us! Be it the almost comical identification of the necessity to secure grants and scientific success, or the quantification of scientific success by its profitability.

Science became a business, a mere profession in which we strive for personal gain. True passion for the Unknown, the challenging, the dissent from norm are no longer the fuel by which science drives itself and the progress all around it. The scientific method slowly looses its meaning as an objective tool to delineate the laws of nature, as a vehicle for the exchange and dissemination of ideas about, possibilities of, and facts hinting at the workings of nature. How many of us think that one publication, however mediocre, in a high-impact journal is more worth than a challenging yet factually solid work in a lesser known forum? We are now trained by our "masters" to strive for the former, and all too often it is the mere name of these "masters" which ensures on of those heavily contested spots in the high-impact house of cards, not the scientific merit the work stands on. All too often we spend more time in such battles than with actually advancing knowledge. And this trend, at least from my perspective, became frighteningly worse in the past two decades.

We scientists are slowly turned into slaves! Slaves of greedy interests injected from outside our own family. Slaves of a fast rising mediocrity which declares subjective opinions as being en par with objective facts, a mediocrity which successfully replaces with a frightening pace academic freedom with "safe spaces", this way silencing dissent from all-to-often nonsensical subjective trifel by enforcing and realizing a "guilty until proven innocent" mentality akin to the fictional Cardassian judicial system, thus stifling and ultimately destroying the very foundation on which progress rests. Slaves of our own reluctance to self-criticize, or accept self-critique, thus allowing those black sheep to thrive and slowly destroy the ethical very foundation of science. Slaves of our inner desire to leave a mark in the book of knowledge, whatever the costs, even if that means to use all tools at our disposal to deflect dissent, or even rewrite the rules by which this book is written. After all, it is easier to stick to and defend the old and known, the easy, the subjective, the fictive, however wrong, than to accept the less clean, perhaps unpleasant and challenging new, however right, however true. After all, we are humans, and, as such, we look upon the new and challenging, the dismantling of our own thoughts, and change with great anxiety.

But we became, or should have chosen to become, scientists because we can abstract from those stirring, testing and exacting feelings, rise above personal, human, shortcomings, guided by the most honorable and rewarding of objectives, the search for objective truth. If we are not able to do so, why we became truth-hunters in the first place? I asked many times younger scientists for their goals, their dreams, their ideals, about the Why which guided their decision to become a scientist. In some cases the answers are mundane projections, in most cases a prolonged period of silence. We seem to have forgotten what science truly is, what it means to be a true scientist!

Science is art!

We are artists, paining with the brush of our imagination over the white on the canvas of knowledge. We, together with the armies of poets, artists, technicians, engineers, create true progress. We all are the sole creative force of human history and, as such, are more powerful than anything and anyone else ever was, is, and will be. Paul Karl Feyerabend wrote in "Science in a Free Society": "A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life." Without us, mankind would descend back into the Dark Age, a superstition-fueled shadow of a moral society where reason and fact were burned at the stake. Without us, mankind would not be!

To quote Feyerabend once more: "Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives." (in: "Against Method"). We became scientists because our intellect allows us to transcend the obvious, the apparent, and delineate the layers of truth which lie beneath and make up the workings of the universe. We are free, and we can travel to fantastic places with the mere stroke of chalk on a blackboard. Yet we submit ourselves to rules and constraints put into place by forces which never felt the bliss of the Unknown, forces which never experienced that solitary exuberating moment of discovery of something new, people who will never understand that, in the moment of conception of even the tiniest of fractions of the Absolute Truth, one becomes one with the universe, one with the Absolute.

I doubt that this attempt of control wasn't always the case, as history shows, but in the past decades we allowed these forces en masse onto our playground. We unlearned to self-criticize, and view self-critique, however constructive, as a danger to our existence. We submit more and more to "law-and-order", as Feyerabend puts it, to rules injected by forces which don't understand, and worse, have no desire to understand and comprehend. This empowers the suppression of creativity and will, ultimately, lead to the end of the Scientific Idea. If this happens, we will tumble back into a paradise devoid of progress, a Garden of Eden with eternally repeating routines of mediocrity, and loose our privilege of being self-aware, conscious entities in an eternal universe. Then it will take another Snake, and again a few millennia, to set us free, to make us human again, to make us feel the bliss of life, make us aware. Let us eat the apple, once more, to save our future!

Science is search for objective truth!

As such, and by definition, science is against rigidity, blind believe, politics. "It is rigid dogma that destroys truth; and, please notice, my emphasis is not on the dogma, but on the rigidity. When men say of any question, 'This is all there is to be known or said of the subject; investigation ends here,' that is death. It may be that the mischief comes not from the thinker but for the use made of his thinking by late-comers." (Alfred North Whitehead, "Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead"). We became slaves of our own greed, frowning upon intellectual challenges if they only hint at impairing the status we so long strove for. We seem to have forgotten that science is not just the history of great ideas, but perhaps more so the history of failures and their admitting which lead to great ideas. We will never reach the Absolute Objective Truth, but walk along a path searching for it, a path riddled with failure, errors and insufficiencies. It is frightening how few scientists can admit failure and open themselves up to the next step on this path.

This self-critical search for objective truth constitutes the core of the scientific method, but is slowly overwritten by egocentricity, arrogance and the comical desire to preserve the impression of reputation and fame, whatever the cost. More and more religion-inspired nonsensical dogma stains the purity of the Scientific Idea, stains left behind by the black sheep who we, through sheer ignorance and lack of self-critical reflection, allowed and allow to roam amidst us, stains left behind by an external, control-demanding machinery of interests which is to a large extent devoid of any understanding of the scientific method, but acts powerfully guided by distorted material self-interests to further short-lived agendas which do more harm than good to all of humanity. If we don't start to clean up those stains now, and prevent more from appearing, we will ultimately be responsible for the demise of the future of the human race!

For the sole reason of preserving what I believe constitutes the very foundation of the Scientific Idea and, thus, human progress, for the sole reason of preserving the ideal of what science stands for, I will, I must declare war against all black sheep, against the forces which allow them to strive and take over the meaning of my and every genuine scientists very existence, against the overtaking of the scientific method by mediocrity devouring greed, material interests, self-interests, arrogance, ignorance and intolerance.

This Declaration of War against all egocentric forces, external and internal, which attempt to hinder and silence progress, freedom, the meaning of life itself was written almost a century ago, but is as valid, inspiring and passionate now as it was back then. I take in this incomplete personal footnote, as a final act, the liberty to cite this Declaration of War in full: