The mind is information and all information can be simulated. A system that simulates the information of the mind is a simulated mind, a cognitive system. And Gracious is for building simulated minds, living machines.
Gracious is a collection of operators for the construction of the cognitive systems which give rise to consciousness. While these systems are inspired by their biological implementations in the human brain, this is not meant to be neuro-biological simulation. Furthermore, while the behaviour of these systems may exhibit properties of a "learning machine" this is not a machine learning framework. There is no back-propagation or gradient descent. Instead, Gracious rests, fundamentally, on Hebbian learning with bipolar association between distributed signal representations.
The theory behind Gracious is largely based on the works of Dr. Pentti O. Haikonen. Dr. Haikonen developed the Haikonen Associative Neuron and the Haikonen Cognitive Architecture which Gracious structures are largely inspired by. Several modifications have been made to Dr. Haikonen's designs. Dynamic neuron groups and an optimized 3:1 Hebbian learning have been added in the name of improved computational efficiency. These modifications have maintained there efficacy and are comparable in output. Other modifications, including simulated architecture and bipolar associations have been added to improve on Dr. Haikonen's original designs. These concepts are not critical to the high-level operation of Gracious simulations.
However, unlike Dr. Haikonen, the Art of the Living believes minds simulated on a computer are both possible and equally valid in every way to those achieved in hardware. Implementing these designs in software provides faster construction and testing of these systems, and, most importantly, the capacity for native integration with traditional digital representations of data. While hardware, or wetware, systems may be vastly more efficient when compared to simulation, this is only a meaningful argument once such systems are feasible. As for now, the super-massive computational capacity available to mankind must suffice.