As the philosophers say, to know life you have to look back, and that's absolutely true.However, they forget another proposition: life must look ahead. All organisms with complex nervous systems face from time to time the questions that life poses: What do I do next? Jean Piaget once said that intelligence is something you use when you don't know what to do (this is the exact description of the situation I was in when I tried to write about intelligence).If you're good at finding the right answers to the multiple-choice questions life presents you with, then you're capable.But being wise is much more than that. It's the creative ability by which you come up with new ideas instantly, with answers flooding your brain, some better than others.

When we look at the leftovers in the refrigerator and wonder what else we need from the grocery store to prepare dinner, we display intelligence that rivals that of the most able ape.Top-notch chefs leave us dumbfounded with interesting combinations of ingredients that we would never have imagined would intermingle.The poet is particularly good at the arrangement of words, and the contagious meaning produced by this arrangement is convincing.We are all also honing new expressions a thousand times a day, rearranging words and gestures to convey new messages.Whenever you want to say a sentence you've never said before, you face the same creative problem as cooks and poets—you're ruminating over it in your head at the last moment before you say it .

In recent years, we have made a lot of progress in determining where in the brain semantics are processed.We often find that verbs are in the frontal lobe of the brain, and for some reason proper names seem to favor the frontal temporal lobe, while concepts of color and tools seem to be found in the left posterior temporal lobe.But intelligence is a process, not a position.It is a process involving many brain regions through which we search for new meanings, often "consciously". Researchers experienced with intelligence, such as IQ researchers, avoid using the word "consciousness."Many of my fellow neuroscientists also avoid using the word "consciousness" (some physicists, however, have been happy to fill the vacuum with common beginner mistakes).Some clinicians unintentionally downplay "consciousness" and redefine it as simply "arousability" (although the brain is regarded as the center of consciousness, it is actually like confusing a switch with a light).We can either redefine "consciousness" as mere "awareness" or as the "searchlight" of selective attention.

These understandings all contribute to the exploration of the question, but they all ignore the mental initiative by which you create, modify, and recreate yourself.Your intellectual mental activity is a reflection of your inner and outer world, which is constantly changing, partly under your control, partly invisible to your introspection, and even unpredictable. (It's almost completely out of your control during your four or five sleep phases each night).In this book I have tried to illustrate how your inner psyche is constantly developing as you steer yourself from one subject to another; as you establish and deny different possibilities.This interpretation is not only based on psychologists' research on intelligence, but also from behavioral science, evolutionary biology, linguistics and neuroscience.

There have been some good reasons for avoiding a full discussion of consciousness and wisdom.A very good strategy in scientific research is to break the problem into small pieces, especially when mechanistic explanations do not help you construct a research approach to an ambiguous subject.In a sense, people do this all the time. The second reason is to hide the real issue from everyone (except insiders) to avoid trouble, which in modern idiom is to maintain the skill of denial.Some words, while having everyday meanings, also have special connotations used only by insiders.Whenever I see these words, I always think of the code name.Centuries ago, making an unabashedly mechanistic analogy to the mind would get you into serious trouble—even in more forgiving Western Europe.It should be admitted that Julien Offory de La Mettrie was not entirely wrong when he inadvertently said it.The French physician (1709-1751) wrote a pamphlet in 1747 called Man-Machine, in which he compared human motivation to a spring releasing energy in a machine.

In 1746, Ramantelli fled from France to Amsterdam.He once wrote a book called "The Natural History of the Soul".The Paris Assembly disliked the book so much that it ordered it burned. This time, he published his pamphlet Man-Machine discreetly and anonymously.The Dutch, who were recognized as the most tolerant in Europe at the time, were outraged by this and tried to find out the author of this pamphlet and take revenge. They almost achieved their goal.Ramantelli was forced to flee again, this time to Berlin, where he died four years later at the age of 42. Although Ramantelli was ahead of his time, he was not the one who started the comparison of man to machine.Descartes already did this a century ago in his Mankind.He also moved from his native France to Amsterdam, roughly at the same time as the entanglement between Galileo and the Vatican over the scientific method itself.One could argue that the reason Descartes did not have to flee the Netherlands like Lamantelli did was that he took care not to publish the book until a number of years after Anron's death.

Descartes and his followers did not want to ban all talk of the mind; in fact, one of their particular concerns was to pinpoint the location of the "abode of the soul" in the brain.This is a continuation of the academic tradition of focusing on the cerebral ventricles filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Religious scholars 500 years ago believed that the various parts of the soul lived in these cavities: memory in one; fantasy, imagination, and common sense in one; thinking and judgment in another.In their view, the ventricle is like a bottle filled with the devil, a container for the soul.Descartes believed that the pineal gland was a better location for the control center on the basis that the pineal gland is one of the few structures in the brain that do not occur in pairs.

It is now the end of the millennium.While there are theocratic states, it's still a good idea to use cryptic expressions in those states.But in general, we are no longer bothered by machines as metaphors for spirit.We can even discuss the principled basis of any analogy between mind and machine.It has been plausibly argued that the mind is creative and unpredictable, whereas we know machines are unimaginative but reliable.Thus, a machine such as a digital computer may seem at first to be an unreasonable analogy. Yes!But Descartes just said that it is a useful way of talking about the brain as if it were a machine.By peeling back the layers of the onion, you're constantly making progress.Even if there is indeed something else lurking beneath its outer layers, scientists tend to think that there is nothing fundamentally unknowable and can always try other possible explanations.This scientific strategy—not to be confused with scientific conclusions—has produced a revolution in our understanding of ourselves.

The mechanistic approach to the mind has long been missing a crucial mechanism, the bootstrapping mechanism.We are accustomed to the idea that even a decent artifact, such as a watch, requires a skilled watchmaker.It's common sense, like Aristotle's mechanical materialism, even though it's wrong. But even since Darwin, we've known that delicate things can evolve (self-organize) from simple starting things.As the philosopher Daniel Dennett points out in the preface to Darwin's Dangerous Thought, even highly educated people are not comfortable accepting this self-extensive view:

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has always fascinated me, but over the years I've found various pseudo-thinkers who can't hide their dislike for Darwin's great ideas.These people run the gamut from the critical skeptic to the outright hostile.I also found that not just laymen and religious thinkers, but lay philosophers, psychologists, physicists, and even biologists, seemed inclined to think that Darwin was wrong. However, this is not the whole story.Just 15 years after its publication in 1859, the psychologist William James laid out his view in a letter to a friend that there is a Darwinian process involved in the mind.A century later, we are only just beginning to give real meaning to this Darwinian view with the appropriate brain mechanisms.For decades we've been talking about the selective survival of overproduced synapses, and that's just an untrue version of Darwinism, like carving a pattern into a block of wood.We also now see that the wiring of the brain may be sufficiently Darwinian to operate on the time scale of consciousness, from milliseconds to minutes.

It's a Darwinian way of making the less certain.It involves making many copies of a certain pattern of brain firing, giving those copies a certain mutation, and then having those mutants compete for dominance within a confines of a workspace (like crabgrass and June Heyi in my backyard. competition on the lawn).The outcome of the competition depends on how well the spatiotemporal patterns of those firings fit the "bumps in the road" (patterns of memory stored in synaptic strength).As you will see, this Darwinian machine is a subject that I am passionate about, but before we get to that, let's get some conceptual insight into what intelligence is and isn't. Journalists often ask questions like: "who-what-where-when-why-how".This is a useful strategy for exploring the mysteries of intelligence, which avoids premature definitions.I'll start with "what" intelligence consists of, and when it's needed—because the term has so many meanings that it's sometimes easy to get confused (as is the word consciousness).Slightly narrowing the term intelligence, so as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, is the task of the next chapter.I will then proceed to deal with the various levels of interpretation, and the confusion caused by the word "consciousness". When exploring the question of "how" intelligence evolved, especially when discussing the evolution of intelligence in the distant ancestors of human beings, it is of great significance to examine the evolution of the Ice Age as an analogy.Alaska's coastline is the best place to see glaciers that are still active.Glacier Bay is about 80 kilometers long. It was filled by glaciers 200 years ago, but now it is full of seals, canoes and cruise ships that cause traffic jams. Evolutionary, although from an efficiency point of view, experts are always better at a certain field.Is there a simple answer to this question?The answer is that efficiency is no longer the most critical factor because the climate continues to change suddenly and unexpectedly. In Chapter 4, I discuss the mental machinery required to parse complex sentences with syntax.Many observers, myself included, have assumed that the great leaps in intelligence during human evolution arose from certain logical structures that a language with a grammar would need and be useful for other tasks as well."Chimpanzees and bonobos" (the African pygmy chimpanzee is a distinct ape whose English name is now inherited from the natives) allows us to determine the role of language in intelligence and consciousness in an important way. We All that our ancestors have left us is bones and fossils, but we can learn a lot about how our ancestors behaved from our distant cousins. The fifth chapter discusses the problem of convergent and divergent thinking from the perspective of Darwin process.Small neurobiology conferences, such as the one I attended in Monterey Bay, certainly exemplify convergent thinking—all the experts trying to find the right answer as the mechanisms of memory are studied.Creative people who are trying to discover scientific theories or who want to write poetry need divergent thinking, or more generally, to make up for mistakes on multiple-choice exams.Whenever a neurobiologist proposes an explanation for the mechanism of memory storage, someone in the audience proposes several different explanations for the problem using divergent thinking.How to elevate a novel idea into a high-quality theory that is different from molding a lump of clay into a clay pot by hand?The answer may be in the title of Chapter Five.Darwinian evolution forms new species over the course of tens of millions of years, and new antibodies in immune responses lasting weeks can likewise form thoughts on the time scale of thought and action. In Chapter 6, I will draw an analogy between mental processes and other known Darwinian processes.I'll show how our brains (physiologically mechanistically) manipulate representations to give rise to a competition for reproduction that can be Darwinian, making a reasonable guess out of chaos.Breaking down problems into brain codes (like the abstract barcodes on apples and oranges) and brain circuits (especially the circuits in the surface layers of the cortex that process "internal mail") allowed me to understand the Intellectual functions, such as how we guess, say things that have never been said before, and even spread the wings of metaphors, are the most successful explorations to date. It seems to me that this brain version of the "Darwin machine" will fundamentally change our conception of being human.Like the dodo in Alice in Wonderland said, there is no better way to explain a game than to demonstrate it, and I'll take you on a walk through the Darwinian process of forming thoughts and decisions.I'm happy to say that describing consciousness doesn't have to be as hard as describing how to ride a bicycle; moreover, you'll understand it better after developing a feel for its process rather than just being content with abstract remarks. (If you skip this beloved chapter, you'll get abstract treatises from Chapters 5 and 7.) In the final chapter, I will summarize the elements of intelligence discussed in the previous chapters, focusing mainly on the mechanisms by which an alien intelligence or artificial intelligence is to be developed on a broad scale These mechanisms are needed to function (from the brilliant chimpanzee to the musical genius of humans).Finally I will offer some caveats for any transition to superhuman intelligence, as the Chess Queen gave Alice about "races": you have to keep running to stay put. One theory describes man as a sensory machine propelled by external pressures, stripped of all creativity and spontaneity.The second theory gives people "play space" to create various ideas and try them out.Knowing the world from the first point of view means being confined to this space; from the second point of view means exploring within it.