Mind Computation

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Contents

In the 21st century, intelligence science, brain science and cognitive science are becoming mainstream disciplines of scientific research. One of the challenges faced by human science is how to understand the relationship between mind and brain. It is also the goal of intelligence science exploration. Mind issue is one of the most fundamental and significant issues of intelligence science research [421]. This chapter focuses on mind-related issues of philosophy, biological basis, computation representation and so on.

In this chapter, we focus on the mechanism of consciousness and memory which is guiding us to create the mind model “Consciousness And Memory (CAM)”, which can be taken as a general framework of brain-like intelligent systems.

Memory is the psychological process of accumulation, preservation and extraction of individual experience in the human brain. As a result of memory, people can maintain a reflection of the past, generate new reflections on the basis of past reflections thus make reflections more comprehensive and deep. That is, by having the memory, human beings could accumulate and expand their experiences. Memory is psychological continuation in time, and links up former and later experiences to enable the psychological activity to be a developing and unified process, which forms the psychological characteristics of a person. Memory is a fundamental aspect of the reflecting function.

The origin and essence of consciousness is one of the most important scientific problems. In intellectual science, the consciousness problems have special challenge meanings. Consciousness is not only the theme studied by philosophy, but is also the important subject of contemporary natural scientific research which studies how the existence determines consciousness and how the objective world reflects to the subjective world. Consciousness involves advanced cognitive processes such as the consciousness, attention, memory, signifying, thinking, language, etc., with its core being awareness. In recent years, because of the development of cognitive science, neural science and computer science, and specifically the appearance of the intact experimental technique, the research in consciousness has once again gained importance and has become the common focus of numerous subjects. In the 21st century, consciousness problems will be one of the forts which intellectual science will try hard to solve.

Visual information processing is the process of finding what the objects are and where they are in the scenes from the images. From the input image to the description of the scene, there exists a huge gap. It needs a series of information processing and process understanding to bridge the gap. Understanding the nature of this process is the key to uncover the mystery of the vision. However, we are far from understanding these at present.

Vision mainly has two functions. The first is the perception of objects, i.e., what is it? The second is spatial perception, i.e., where is it? There are concrete facts that show that different brain systems are involved in the above two functions.

Movement is the fundamental of human and animal behavior, which is controlled by the central nervous system. The cerebellar and the basal ganglia are also involved in motor control. In this chapter, the nervous structure of motor control, the analysis of the brain’s electrical signal, and neural encoding of movement are introduced in detail.

The cerebral cortex, which is located on the surface of the human brain, lies in the highest level of the brain’s nervous system. In addition to the perception and motor control of the external world, it also has the advanced cognitive function of language, learning, thinking and emotion. This book is only concerned with language cognition and learning. If you want to learn more about mind and emotion, you can refer to Intelligence Science [431]. This chapter describes language cognition while the next chapter discusses learning…

The learning ability is a fundamental characteristic of the human intelligence. People learn from the objective environment and self-experience constantly their whole life. A person’s cognitive ability and wisdom to their lifelong learning is the gradual formation, development and improvement. This chapter mainly discusses reinforcement learning, deep learning, introspection learning and the brain’s cognitive data analysis.

Through cross-collaboration in the fields of brain science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, we should strengthen basic and original research in the interdisciplinary subject of intelligence science, solve the major basic theory problems of brain-like computing and innovate brain-like computing intelligent systems.

This chapter focuses on the latest progress of brain-like computing and proposes a roadmap for the development of intelligence science.

The following sections are included:

• References
• Index