Please make sure to RSVP below

Please join us for a guest lecture from Chew Soo Hong in EFI room 4.60

Registration from 9.30AM;

Talk from 10:00-10.45AM;

Q&A from 10.45-11:30AM

Intelligence Darwinism

Brain Plasticity, Consciousness, and Survival of the Smartest

Chew Soo Hong

National University of Singapore

Southwestern University of Finance and Economics – Center for Intelligence Economic Science (IES)

http://ies.swufe.edu.cn

In The Principles of Psychology, James (1890) describes consciousness as a “stream” – a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Aumann (2024) argues that such consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentives, underpinning goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Aumann leaves open the question of “How” which we address by relying on brain plasticity at the synaptic level. We hypothesize that the experience of incentive emerges from the modulation of synaptic plasticity respectively by the gain and loss oriented neuromodulators of dopamine and serotonin. Working in tandem with another pair of neuromodulators, acetylcholine and norepinephrine which modulate top-down attention and bottom-up salience respectively yields a stimulus-driven sensory component to how we perceive choice situations, leading to inherently context-sensitive decision making behavior.

Brain plasticity at the synaptic level yields a measure of brain’s information capacity (BIC), the ability to store and retrieve information through dynamic synaptic connectivity. The resulting relation between BIC and the evolution of cephalized animals, from C. Elegans (302 neurons; 7000 synapses) to humans (86 billion neurons, hundreds of trillions of synapses) motivates our definition of (goal) intelligence (GI) in terms of the animal’s ability to make quality decisions to attain goals. Observe that GI applies naturally to research in economics, business, and social sciences in general where decision quality has a pivotal role. Extending GI to collective intelligence (CI) leads to a deeper understanding of adaptation in terms of matching CI with environment for the species. This Intelligence Darwinism shapes natural selection through inter- and intra-species competition thereby delivering survival of the smartest.