Goal Intelligence: From Brain Plasticity to Experiential Consciousness to Decision Quality

讲座内容简介：
In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James describes consciousness as a “stream” – a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In “Why Consciousness?”, Robert Aumann (2024) argues that consciousness evolved to enable the ex5perience of incentives underpinning all economic decision making, while leaving open the question of “How”. Our answer to this question, built on brain plasticity at the synaptic level, delivers a measure of experiential consciousness in terms of the brain's information capacity (BIC). The resulting relation between BIC and the evolution of cephalized animals, from C. Elegans to humansmotivates our definition of intelligence in terms of the organism's ability to make quality decisions to attain goals, i.e., survival of the smartest. Observe that goal intelligence (GI) differentiates biological intelligence (incentivized to attain goals through decision making) from AI (which fulfills goals algorithmically). GI is naturally applicable to research in economics, business, and social sciences in general, where decision quality has a pivotal role.
主讲人简介：
Chew Soo Hong is a Professor at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics where he directs its China Center for Behavioral Economics and Finance. He received his Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies from the University of British Columbia and has taught at the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of California, Irvine, Johns Hopkins University and University of Arizona. He is among the pioneers in axiomatic non-expected utility models and has been pursuing research in the biology of decision making in parallel. Chew is a fellow of the Econometric Society, which awarded him the Leonard J. Savage thesis prize, and of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. He has published in well-regarded journals in economics such as Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, as well as more biology-oriented ones including Neuron, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.