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Introduction

The Importance of Heredity

Needs

All needs work as a set of simple or complex responses, affecting us physically through innate actions and emotionally through reactions in our Limbic system. This model may not actually fit all personalities, allowing for introvert and extrovert behavioral differences, but it serves to provide some understanding of how and why we act in certain given situations. And although this model represents human Psychology, simpler less developed structures have also been noted in animals possessing physical and emotional responses.

Emotions

It should not be debatable at this stage to declare the limbic system central to our emotions and cognitive abilities. Consistent with the latest research, the limbic system helps mediate attention, emotion, learning and resulting memories. Psychologists have recognized eight primary dimensions that this system holds in balance; Expectation-Actuality; Rage-Fear; Fight-Flight; Tension-Relaxation; Pain-Pleasure; Warding Off-Participating; Self Asserting-Self Transcending; Instability-Stability. These intertwined emotional states are normally mutually restraining and complementary, like Rage and Fight, but can reverse-poll thus causing psychological and social pathologies.

As a learning mechanism, the emotional brain provides the ultimate feedback system. All Artificial Intelligence models have one thing in common, a primary feedback system to provide learning signals. Sometimes, these signals come from computational methods and sometimes the end user provides them. In the primate and human mind, this signal is provided by the emotional responses installed as a hereditary component of the brain. Responses for hot & cold, hunger & sick, attachment & threat always provide an emotional response for our brains to use as a learning attribute.

Learning Paradigms

Habituation, learning what not to do, is perhaps the simplest form of learning. Habituation involves the loss of responses over time due to lack of reinforcement. As the brain learns, it builds a response network for different stimuli. If a response lacks some form of reward, i.e. feeding reflex and the stimulation of the satiety center of the hypothalamus, they weaken and become functionally irrelevant in the response system. As C.J. Barnard suggests, the time and energy costs to respond to any and all stimulus is prohibitive thus the body learns to only respond to the rewarding or cost effective stimuli.

Classical Conditioning, or Pavlovian conditioning, is the associative learning method of the brain. Pavlov explained this phenomenon with great detail has he wrote and discussed his historically important dog experiment using food and a bell. The experiment clearly showed that the dogs, after being subject to food and a bell ring over time, eventually learned to expect food when only the bell was rung.

Operant Conditioning, or Trail-and-Error learning, is the discovery of responses when no clear response is initially obvious. For example, when an animal is searching for food, it performs a variety of responses. If it succeeds in finding food in a particular location over multiple feedings, it will associate the location with food thus providing a sense of direction for the next time its hungry. Central to this concept as well as Classical Conditioning is reinforcement. As the animal learns, it encounters positive and negative reinforcement through emotional responses. This stimuli is interpreted and used to strengthen or weaken a set of responses, and as time goes by, begins to build definitive and separate response networks for stimuli.

Latent Learning, learning without patent reward, is a complex form of learning because of its implied functionality. Rats are said to display latent learning capability when they learn a maze. Since the rat does not get an immediate reward when it turns a corner or moves straight through the maze, and only gets rewarded if and when it finds the food, there must be some spatial & temporal causation. Research showed that once rats learned the maze, making some form of a mental map, they demonstrated the ability to access the learned map and use it to efficiently locate food.

Insight Learning, the process of reasoning, is arguably the most advanced form of learning. This form of learning is said to occur when decisions are made too rapidly, not allowing enough time for the trail-and-error style learning method. Examples of this method are illustrated by the rat finding shortcuts through newly provided doors in a maze, or by chimpanzees building stacks of boxes to get to bananas hung from above.

Imprinting, the last of Thorpes methods, is the narrowing of the range of stimulus which social orientation is managed. This can be explained as an innate tolerance for different classes of stimuli that is compatible with the animal. Here, we find neonatal attachments and courtship. An example of imprinting can be found in birds illustrating naïve preferences for objects with certain characteristics like color, shape and motion. This is also seen in newly hatched ducklings imprinting on the first big living thing as mom. But the most fascinating aspect of this mechanism is the timely institution of a particular preference over the course of the animal’s development. Humans demonstrate these ‘critical periods’ as they develop from neonatal to early childhood, through juvenile to adult hood.

Functional Theories of the Brain

Descartes’ Cartesian Dualism theory is based upon a mind-body relationship of differing but interacting substances. The mind, the thoughts and emotional meanings, can act upon and be affected by the physical stimulus and processes of the body. This substance relationship theory suggests that the information normally labeled as thoughts are not just physical signals transmitting over neural pathways but more like magnetic waves of signals. These waves can then combine to affect the physical brain processes. Finally, the concept of Unconsciousness and Consciousness need to be explained in the brain. At best, these labels are ambiguous but shed some light on some obvious facts. Some responses and actions occur well below our awareness level while others tend to force our attention. These facts suggest that as the brain learns to pay attention to the more meaningful aspects of our environment, ignoring the less relevant information.

Summary & Conclusions

A thorough study of epistemology clearly shows the presence of the invariant organization & adaptation functions. These functions, broken into several mechanisms, provide a stable and effective means for learning in animals. Conditioning, like Pavlovian or Operant, provide the basic rudimentary learning that builds stimulus-response pairs and associative networks. As the neural networks develop more advance learning processes, like Latent & Insight learning, start to use the learned knowledge to provide causation. Here we find the beginnings of Foresight, Hindsight and possibly imagination. All the while these mechanisms are developing the networks, our innate attitudes and preferences guide us to optimal Psychological states.

The Oxford Companion to the Mind defines Cognition as “The use or handling of knowledge” that uses knowledge-based processes to make sense of the “neurally-coded” information. Encompassing sub processes like attention, memory and learning, cognition is not an individual part but the whole that encapsulates and characterizes its mission. Thus, cognition can be defined as the processing of a time-series of thoughts and reactions that produce some result. The result, possibly having no distinction of intelligence, is based on the experiences of the host. As cognition works building experiences, Self establishes within the knowledge base and causes a separation between the neural substance of the body and the knowledge base of the mind.

In conclusion, the AI industry must make a concerted effort to understand the complexities and properties of the animal brain. As the brief review of the brain illustrates, Neural Network architectures are more complex than implemented in practice. Also, intelligence is rooted not only by the processes of a 3-brain system but includes heredity and its interaction with the said processes. Understanding the brain will provide a road map to intelligence, but will also confirm that intelligence is not even a guaranteed product of the brain. Therefore, we must concede that intelligence is not the product of the brain but the product of the process of the brain. Hence, correct knowledge and good experience is a fundamental requirement for true intelligent behavior.

Resources & Links

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, Chris Eliasmith (Ed.)

Hampden-Turner, Charles. (1981). Maps of the Mind. Mitchell Beazley Publishers, Ltd., London; Macmillan Publishing Co., New York.

LeDoux, Joseph. (1996). The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster, New York.

The Oxford Companion to The Mind, (1987), Oxford University Press