This book invites readers to explore the intricate world where Artificial Intelligence (AI), consciousness, and human cognition intersect. This groundbreaking book considers the profound differences between man and machine, challenging existing notions in AI and cognitive science. It argues that the key to understanding intelligence lies not in software, but in the hardware of our brain – a complex biochemical system far removed from current AI architectures. Through a deep examination of time, perception, language, and the nature of thought, the book presents a compelling case for the indispensability of biology and consciousness in cognition. To achieve this, to engineer this, will indeed be a challenge for AI. Artificial general intelligence (AGI), is the gleam in the eye of the AI community. This gleam was there “at the beginning,” the beginning being in the 1950s. However, in the author’s experience (circa 1972) the computer metaphor of mind swept into a then rather sleepy cognitive psychology just barely emerging from the grips of Skinner’s rats, a field that, given this injection of the computational framework, ultimately became cognitive science. This beginning was with the publication of Newell and Simon’s Human Problem Solving, a work dedicated to showing that a fundamental algorithm, means-ends analysis, could be applied to tasks like theorem proving, cryptarithmetic problems, even chess. The generative pretrained transformers (GPTs) of generative AI, we shall see, choose a different route, in one way doing an end-around for the entire problem, in another way, simply following the same approach, but essentially relying on a form of a premade solution to the problem.

The Challenge to AI: Consciousness and Ecological General Intelligence (MLI Generative AI Series) PDF

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