An autonomous control system with intellectual capabilities
— A process capable of rational and emotional thought
1.
In order to tackle philosophically the proposition of whether the human mind and body can be separated, the book (What Is Death, Shelly Kagan) uses the example of the 'evening star' (the star that beckons the dog's bowl) and the 'morning star' (the bright star) to explain.
To put the conclusion first: the morning star cannot exist without the evening star. The reverse is also true. This explains that the rational thinking people commonsensically judge and understand cannot always become reality. The reason is that the evening star and the morning star are both different names for Venus. Also, you cannot say that just because you cannot see the evening star, it does not exist. Not being seen(perceived)does not mean that existence has disappeared.
2.
Reading this, I want to extend the thought a little by applying it to the cognitive engineering mechanism I have been preparing personally, and I think we could arrive at the following conjecture.
The left and right hands are different objects, so even if one is lost the other can continue to exist. (That much is from the book, but it appears as a side branch, so I want to take the thought in a slightly different direction.) However, while they are connected they are one body, so upon sudden loss or injury you feel pain or the sense of loss.
The common sense that plants are living things only gained universal assent after the 15th century. (Although it does not seem that people treat them as living things in behavior even now.) Before that, they were simply 'it,' no different from machines.
2-1
It is said that humans feel pain because we have a mind or a soul. Of course, the location of that thing is still contested, and this book (What Is Death, Shelly Kagan) also works hard to explain its own view.
I do not, in fact, much care about the question of whether it is a fact. Even a rational or philosophical theory has no foundation for judgment or inference if, as with section '1.' above, the judge has not experienced it or if it does not exist within a reality the judge can perceive (borrowing the book's expression, if there is no 'trait' in the judge's memory—qualitative experience that only an individual entity can perceive/judge—there is no basis for judgment or inference. For example, a blind person standing before red, or receiving that information through voice, cannot feel the emotions that an ordinary person might feel like danger or blood). If you have not experienced it, you cannot understand or empathize with it. My personal interest is in finding hints, using a 'neuron mechanism composed of basic signal perception and processing systems,' which we could call physicalist, to build a metaphysical 'artificial intelligence process capable of rational and emotional thought.'
2-2
Back to the main thread: if human pain is like that, what about plants, which we judge to be living things? Do they feel the emotions of living things from their roots? Their leaves? Or their stems? Is the location of that perception a single place? Or a holistic aggregate?
Let us try to understand this together with the content from section '1.,' 'just because a star is not visible does not mean it does not exist.'
Could we then make this guess? Perhaps the emotions we feel are not perceived by a single entity but are merely the holistic perception of the information collected by individual neurons. Therefore perception is not a single area, but rather the intersecting region of a neural network of information, or the region where it happens most actively / most frequently.
For example, most people would say the brain reads emotions. There are also cases where a child who received a heart transplant can recall parts of the donor's memories—that could be an example too.
2-3
What about dreams? Connecting this to the timing of information processing, I think we might get a hint for my own project. That is, rather than immediately analyzing content at the moment events or information are received, for non-urgent, non-sensitive information it is handled similarly to distributed computing's use pattern: the main processing happens during the low-power (sleep) mode. If the information to be processed is comprehensive, or judged to fall outside the range the social (learned) rational judgment domain can handle, it is set aside and processed during sleep time, when brain usage is lowest.
Applying this to my project: just as a person sometimes remembers dreams and sometimes does not, a machine too, depending on the information processed, could recognize cases where it remembers and cases where it does not.
