Page 193 - Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Neural Networks and Brain Computing

4. Need for New Directions in Understanding Brain and Mind 183

FIGURE 8.16
Big picture of levels of consciousness.

As I look at the broader issues of human mind and human experience, I see a
picture more and more like Fig. 8.16, adapted from my 2009 paper [32]:
Some philosophers have asked: “at what level of intelligence or of soul does an
organism or a computer make the transition from being unconscious to not being
conscious?” In my view, that question itself is grossly naı ¨ve, and reflects a lack
of understanding of any of the many forms or definitions of consciousness.
Consciousness is a matter of degree or of level [40], not a “yes” or “no” question.
The human brain is basically just a half a level up from the mouse brain, as discussed
briefly in my 2011 IJCNN paper [41] and in more detail in one of my papers in
Neural Networks from 2012 [42]. We are not born with a complete ability to use
symbolic reasoning and logic and mathematics, or even to use language itself in a
completely sane manner; we can learn to emulate sanity or integrity (zhengqi)
[43], but it does not come naturally. All we are born with, beyond the kind of
learning we see in the mouse brain, are “mirror” neurons and the machinery which
supports them: machinery which allows us to include vicarious experience in our
own database of memories which we learn from, and to “dance out” our own past
experience in ways which other people can assimilate. True natural language is
just a kind of dance with words. The core challenge in developing human potential
is for us to learn to fully emulate sanity, and then to emulate the higher levels of
consciousness which sanity opens up [44].
In the end, I view human consciousness as just one small village within a larger
cosmos, as depicted in Fig. 8.17:
Fig. 8.17 was developed to support a discussion in China of the classic “Three
Body” trilogy by Cixin Liu. In my view, dark matter and dark energy (which form