Natural Brains and Motivated, Emotional Mind

We know that the brain is the seat of the mind. Constructing the reductive model of the conscious mind requires an indication of the laws according to which the mind emerges from biophysical processes occurring in natural brains. Because in Part I, the authors presented the theoretical model referring to the ideal structures of the imagined neural network, we now have easier task, because we need to indicate in the brains of the living beings those processes that functionally correspond to our postulates. Such suitability is not guaranteed by known processes occurring in specialized parts of the brain. The role of the primary sensory areas is a detailed analysis of sensory stimuli with specific modality. They result in analysis of the meaning of all useful stimuli and their interpretation used in various parts of the cortex. The high specialization of individual cortex areas is striking and are the result of evolutionary development of the brain. New brain structures, such as the new cortex, were added on the outskirts of existing structures, improving their performance in the ever more demanding environments, where other intelligent beings ravened. But even as we know the brain organization, we struggle to understand how it works. How neurons that make the brain work together to create the conscious mind. To discover functionally effective processes in the brain, one need to reach for the biophysical properties of the astrocyt-neural network. In this chapter, the authors suggest that some concepts of neuro-electro-dynamics and the phenomena of neuro- and synapto-genesis as well as synaptic couplings may explain the processes of categorization, generalization and association leading to the formation of extensive, semihierarchical brain structures constituting neural representations of perceptions, objects and phenomena. Natural brains meet the embodiment condition. They are products of evolution, so they have intentionality, their own goals and needs. So they can naturally show emotions, drives and instincts that motivate to act. This determines the nature of constructed mental representations. They are the subject of psychological research, which shows the motivation of pain and pleasure in the field of intelligent activities, as well as the motivation of curiosity and the need for understanding in the domain of propositional and phenomenal consciousness. They describe the way pain is felt in organisms as basic quale. The role of other qualia for “how-it-is-like to feel something” and their subjective character was explained, as well as their interspecies specificity was characterized. In this chapter, the authors present an elementary biophysical phenomenon, that is a flash of consciousness. This phenomenon is synaptic coupling formed in the course of learning. They justify that the stream of such phenomena is the foundation of consciousness. They also point out that the astrocytic-neural network meets all the conditions required to generate conscious sensations.

Building Representations in Motivated Learning

If an intelligent system is to benefit from prior experiences, then such a system must have the ability to learn. Learning must lead to the gathering of new knowledge of increased complexity and is based on the exploration of the world and social interactions. In this chapter authors describe building representations in motivated learning, a process that is close to learning by natural systems and yields better learning results in artificial systems than reinforcement learning. An embodied agent's mission is to survive in an unfavorable environment. The agent must have needs whose fulfillment is a measure of its success – survival. Meeting these needs require physical and mental efforts, and the development of useful skills is associated with the development of intelligence. The agent's environment must provide conditions in which individuals will be subjected to pressure from an environment in which better solutions, greater skills, and broader knowledge count. The agent treats unmet needs as signals to act. The strength of these signals depends on the degree of unmet needs so that the agent can differentiate between them and compared them. Various need signals provide motivation for action and control the learning process. In complex environments, there are rules that regulate the relationships between objects. By discovering these rules, the machine gains knowledge about the environment. Knowledge is represented by building connections between neurons in semantic memory. New concepts, objects, needs, or motor skills are represented by adding new memory cells and by associating them with other concepts, actions, and needs. Whether or not a new object or idea is created in semantic memory depends on the mechanism of novelty detection. The more time an agent spends on working or playing with an object, the better it learns the object's physical properties and how to use it. The intended use of objects determines characteristic features needed to classify them. Initially, semantic memory does not store any concepts, does not know places, does not recognize any objects, and does not support any activities or motivations. New concepts or representations of objects emerge from observation and manipulation of objects. A virtual agent's semantic memory obtains symbolic representations of objects and their location or movement in the observed scene. The focus of perceptual attention may result from detection of novelty, change, movement, signal intensity, or meaning in the context of needs. Attention should be focused long enough for the working memory to evaluate how much observed object or considered plan is useful. The focus of attention must also be accompanied by the possibility of switching attention. The attention switching responds to various types of signals, from sensory stimuli through planning and monitoring of performed activities to associative activation of memory. It results from constant rivalry between these signals for attention.

The Reductive Model of Mind Explains the Human and Animal Psyche

In this chapter the relationship of consciousness to intelligence is analyzed. The effectiveness of the presented model for beings with different degrees of consciousness is verified. We present how our model relates to such mental processes as permanent and short-term remembering, intensive intentional recall, thoughts wandering, planning, and making decisions, focusing of attention, imagination, intuition, sleep, and subconsciousness. The most distinctive feature of humans against other animals is the ability to use symbolic language. The authors present biophysical basics of language creation. They point out that the structure of knowledge enchanted in semantics is consistent with the hierarchy of representations of mental concepts that create it. They discuss the usefulness of a language for both logical analysis of complex problems with a high degree of abstraction, and the ability to express the subtlest feelings. The subconscious raises enormous and widespread interest, why is this? Subconsciousness directs all our activities, but it does not manifest itself and it is hard to explain, partly because we cannot consciously observe how it works. Yet, in their view, it should be easier to understand than full consciousness. It only serves the purpose of proposing various options. In the subconscious mind these options are getting ready to be selected for consideration by a conscious mind. But sometimes they direct our reaction before the conscious mind takes over full control. In this chapter, the authors try to explain what the subconscious is and how it relates to consciousness. The subconscious is a huge memory storage. It contains all the information resulting from our experiences removed from the area of associations reaching consciousness. Subconscious memories can be inhibited by feedback from unpleasant feelings whose transmission to consciousness is blocked. In this way, they become forgotten episodes that subconsciously affect our actions. Realization of life goals can be considered the essence of existence. This is the basis of our worldview and the main content of consciousness. But our psyche has states much more sophisticated and so important that they have become the subject of our dreams, imaginations, and the highest desire. Remember that human beings, as well as highly organized animals, display many behaviors that are not controlled by conscious mind. Evolution has shaped us to become emotional beings. Emotions significantly affect our behavior, determining the subjective values and quality of perceived objects and phenomena. So the authors include emotions as a significant component of their model. They find that the presented model of a motivated emotional mind can explain the formation of various emotions, feelings, and high mental states identified by modern psychology and psychiatry. They postulate that mental states observed in oneself from a first-person perspective are epiphenomenons of physical processes in the brain. It is propounded out that the presented model of the functioning of the conscious mind is indeed a reductive model.

Embodiment and Phenomenal Consciousness

Can the imaginary brains described in Chapter 1 have only representations of perceived patterns, objects, and events? Can hierarchical structures of neurons also represent feelings, beliefs, emotions, and other higher mental states? Creating feelings requires giving emotional perceptions, memories, plans, beliefs, and intentions. How can this be achieved? How are perceived objects and events using their significance for the fate of the conscious system? Do they meet the various needs of the system? In this chapter we show that to achieve this goal, to feel qualia and to create phenomenal awareness, it is necessary to embody the mind. Mental states, such as thoughts and desires, contain intentional content that can be described by referring to something that we expect or believe. Another category are sensory feelings that do not contain intentional content but instead have different qualitative properties like perceptions, impressions, and sensations. The authors indicate four main domains of cooperation between the body and the brain, so that the mind generated in the system has phenomenal consciousness. These domains are 1) The homeostatic system. The body or housing may contain sensors informing the brain about the internal conditions of the body. The signals from these sensors can complement the information coming from the external senses. 2) The motor system. The housing and body, together with the motor system, allow an individual to manipulate objects in the environment and its own body in the environment. The effects of these manipulations can broaden the experience and allow for their evaluation. 3) Participatory analysis. The body or housing can be used to predict, analyze, and plan activities by making calculations through a physical process. 4) The global states of the organism. Internal power supply parameters, information-processing speed, dynamics of operation, and sensitivity thresholds for internal and external sensors can affect performance, the results of evaluation of sensations, and the shape of neural representations. This assumption makes it possible to explain how the imaginary mind can feel subjective impressions, the qualia that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness. The bodily reactions to the sensory stimuli reaching the brain can give value to individual feelings, and emotions. Feeling hardness or smoothness, assessing the attractiveness of smells, judging the importance of sounds, and evaluating the favor of the environment based on images all go beyond the direct response of the senses. The entire brain is involved in the creation of a conscious mind, along with sensory processing, control of movements, memories, predictions, and all other brain structures. This is an emergent phenomenon that is not reflected in any part of the brain's apparatus. In this chapter, the authors explain to what extent we can be aware of our feelings, how far we can understand the world around us and our place in it, how we can consciously direct our thoughts, and how we can focus attention on something.

Representing the World

Chapter 1 describes how specifically organized, hierarchical structures of a neural network can create neural representations of perceived reality. The authors describe how, as a result of categorization and generalization, memory traces created in subsequent layers can represent the perceived world in all its complexity. Starting from the representation of direct sensual impressions in the lowest layers, closely connected to the sensors of individual senses, to the representation of increasingly complex objects, the feelings and knowledge about the observed world are built. They postulate that to achieve this goal imaginary natural and artificial brains must contain such semihierarchical structures capable of creating new connections and information transmission paths. By associating large areas of brain fields in multiple layers, it is possible to create representations of complex reality. The dominant mechanism of self-learning is correlation learning, during which simultaneous, synchronous arousal of different senses creates mutually correlated features of the observed object. Perceived objects excite neuronal stimulation patterns that allow the system to identify the object in the future. The re-stimulation of the memory structures from the top layers to the sensory fields, causes the recall and creation of sensations similar to those felt during the original experiences. By comparing new sensual impressions with those stored in memory, the perceived objects are recognized. Frequent, simultaneous co-occurrence of stimulations of mental representations results in associations of memory cells and synapses, and thus associations of mental facts. Order and sequences of their occurrence is the basis of episodic memory. Imagined neural network memory cells, like natural brain neurons, do not limit their role to just remembering the information that they receive. They actively process this information and change the structure of their connections. We put forward the thesis that the described memory cells, artificial neurons, can create brains with features such as natural brains. It is this semihierarchical structure of neurons, which arise from categorization, generalization and association processes that can create neural representations of perceived reality. Learning through life experiences allows us to give them the characteristics of psychological sensations and thus they also become mental correlates of perceptions. The knowledge that these structures represent is as hierarchical they are. This hierarchy starts from the representation of the simplest direct sensual features, to complex models of the environment and abstract concepts that can be defined by symbolic language. The presented model describes the creation of knowledge in the mind, pattern recognition, remembering and imagining objects and events, planning, and making decisions. The systems thus created yield minds with cognitive, intentional, and propositional awareness. Unfortunately, they are devoid of phenomenal awareness, which we write about in the following chapters.

Epilogue

The future will most likely bring machines with artificial conscious minds, that at some point will be more intelligent than we are. But their minds will be also different than ours. Will we be able to understand them? Will they understand us? A sense of consciousness is a simple, direct feeling, so it is a quale! This is a subjective, first-person experience. We will never be able to describe it in a strictly symbolic language and even less so in formal one such as mathematics, geometry, or logic. Reflecting on how we can understand our own consciousness, we must consider the foundation for understanding. A sense of understanding requires the compatibility of a stimulant signal with activated cognitive memory fields. The feeling of consciousness is related to every act of recognition and the attribute of reflective consciousness is to realize that we are conscious. The essence of consciousness is to build a model of reality, to define/understand its place in this reality, and to feel emotion and satisfaction arising from that fact. The mind understands what can be “good” for it in the shorter and longer term. The formulation of the long-term goal of existence constitutes a sense of self-existence and, consequently, the meaning of the world as a tool for fulfilling one's mission in this world. It is astonishing that if we ask about the purpose and meaning of the matter, we must admit that no such purpose exists, if there is no consciousness for which we could formulate such a purpose. Thus, the meaning and purpose of the existence of matter is the emergence of consciousness. This sense arises at the moment when consciousness arises. The presented model of a motivated emotional mind explains the main features of the human psyche. It explains how reflective and phenomenal consciousness are created, how the mind formulates the meaning and purpose of a person's existence and the meaning of the world around him, how he obtains his free will, and how he can effectively act for his own good. It explains how the need for understanding, harmony, and beauty can create art, ethics, and goodness, how emotions directing the mind can unleash feelings of empathy and love. It also explains that to fulfill these functions, to learn everything that is good and noble but also what is evil and immoral, it is necessary to have a body able to influence the environment and the mind to reflect on it.

Consciousness of Motivated, Emotional Mind

The efficient functioning of the conscious mind requires motivation. Motivations are both the source and the reason for its development and sophistication. The motivation for intelligent activities is usually to avoid discomfort and seek pleasure. On the other hand, the implementation of complex life plans and the feeling of higher mental states requires motivation through curiosity and through a desire to learn and discover something new. A mind equipped with cognitive awareness has the ability to observe and assess the effects of its actions on the environment. Creating complex mental representations associating actions with distant impressions and effects allows for their emotional assessment. If bodily experiences are to give meaning to what an individual perceives and remembers, then he must be able to assess the value of his experiences for his own good. Using these experiences and learned knowledge an intelligent system gains the ability to take rational actions to achieve its goals, feel the pain and pleasure resulting from such actions, be sensitive to effects of his actions, be conscious. The analysis of one's own situation and the choice of the optimal mode of operation can be interpreted as implementations of the system's own will. The discussion of restrictions on the choices made indicates that this will of the system is by no means free will. Conscious being decisions depend on the momentary mental states in which the mind is in the process of deciding. They depend on the content of what he has in his memory at the moment, his current mood, available knowledge, his patience for analyzing different variants of behavior and ability to act. In addition to known ontological, physical, and biological limitations, and social (for social beings), there are significant limitations related to the content and structural organization of memory, created associations and beliefs shaped by life experiences and interactions with subconscious mind. Assessing the effects of the operation, satisfying, or not satisfying the needs of the system revealed in the above way creates complex emotional states. Structures and processes leading to the creation of emotions, motivating to rational action for the broadly understood own good, constitute a model of a fully conscious, motivated, emotional mind (MEM). Is the presented model really a reductive model? Do mental states even exist? The authors try to answer these and similar questions in this chapter.

Cognitive Architecture With Episodic Memory

The authors chose a provocative title for this book. In this provocation, there is an incentive for those who would like to understand what consciousness is. Their goal was to explain the phenomenon, which is perhaps even harder to understand than the emergence of life from inanimate matter. Through this work, they developed and described a reductive model of conscious mind named motivated emotional mind. Although the basis for episodic memory are real events that were observed by the agent, memorized episodes can also be generated in the agent's mind. The working memory supports explanation of the meaning of the whole scene by combining the meanings of its constituent elements and their relations. The observed scenes are stored in the episodic memory. An agent can build its value system to assess the significance of observed events and later use it to influence its behavior and its emotional states. Only the conscious being has the ability to remember episodes from its experiences. The conscious system must be able to imagine a hypothetical situation and plan its activities. Because episodic memories require the structures of the hippocampus or its equivalent, if the body has a hippocampus, it is potentially conscious. Working memory is responsible for temporarily storing information that has been perceived in the environment or retrieved from long-term memory. It is important for reasoning, decision-making, and behavioral control. It records stimuli processed in the deeper layers of the brain. In addition, working memory combines temporary storage and manipulates selected information to support cognitive functions. Embodied intelligence architecture discussed in this chapter is aimed at building an intelligent and conscious machines and its ability to learn is recognized as the most important feature of intelligence. Authors show that embodied minds contain certain memory structures, and it is through them that machines can be conscious. The organization of brain structures and their functions constitute a functional, reductive model of the conscious mind, called motivated emotional mind. Different functional blocks of this architecture process information simultaneously, sending interrupt signals to direct attention, change plans, monitor activities, and respond to external threats and opportunities. They also provide a conscious agent with personal memories, accumulated knowledge, skills, and desires, making the agent act fully autonomously. What is needed to build embodied, conscious machines? First of all, their sensing must be based on the observations and predictions of results of their own actions in the real world. This requires the development of sensorimotor coordination integrated with the machine value system. The second requirement is the development of learning methods and control of the robot's movements. This includes the development of motoric functions, activators, grippers, methods of movement, and navigation. The chapter ends with predictions for future development of conscious robots and elaboration on the life and death cycles for conscious minds.

Needs, Feelings, and Emotions of Embodied Mind

Model of artificial mind discussed in this and the following two chapters considers critical elements of the mind operation. The question is whether we can propose artificial brain structures in machines that will be able to create the basis of intelligence and consciousness. Wanting to build an artificial brain, we propose what properties it should have, and how it should be organized. The chapter begins with presenting embodiment of the mind as the part of the environment that is under control of the mind. Perceiving and identifying with one's own body depends on observing the body's actions in the environment. The embodiment must communicate with the brain through channels that ensure the perception of the environment. The use of body dynamics facilitates control, planning, and decision making. Conditions that exist in the real world create a framework for proper action and reflect the compatibility of agent's competencies with the environment. In a conscious embodied mind, representations are created and used for actions. Higher level consciousness can be treated as an abstract version of the coordination of perception and action. Conscious states are triggered by externally supplied signals from the environment and by internally generated mental states. Self-consciousness requires distinguishing oneself from the environment. The definition of embodied intelligence adopted in this book is aimed at building an intelligent and conscious machine. The authors have recognized the ability to learn as the most important feature of intelligence, which is why they consider beings that do not learn anything as not intelligent. Machines will not have the same needs as people but must have needs whose fulfillment is a measure of success. Meeting these needs will require physical and mental effort, and the development of useful skills will be associated with the development of intelligence. The agent treats unmet needs as a signal to act. Using the analogy to pain, these signals representing unmet needs will be called the pain signals. Strength of these signals can be measured and compared with each other. Various pain signals not only provide motivation for action but also control the learning process. Finally, they discuss the role of feelings and emotions and their importance in the agent's learning process. In particular, they discuss their role in creation of conscious sensations. They explain the source of feelings as associated with but different than reward or punishment signals. The signals provided by the senses to anticipate reward or punishment are related to the physical properties of the observed objects, which are directly related to feelings. Pleasure is the promise of meeting a real need. Feelings will fuel emotions. They relate emotions to subconscious reactions to what happened. They also discuss why we may need to build emotional machines and how artificial emotions can be created in machines.