The Essence of Human Mind

How does brain compute 1 + 1? How does brain store this information and adds another 1 to the result to produce 3. This is what I wonder. Computers mechanically save and calculate operations through electrical current, transistors and capacitors. But brain? I have no knowledge in biology so I cannot tell, but figuring out this basic question could be the answer to artificial intelligence and intelligent machines.

Where does free will come from? How come I can decide to lift my right hand or to write '%' out of nowhere. Did the sum of the overall brain activity tell me to do this, or is the something that creates actions out of nowhere? Sum of overall brain activity has to be predetermined from the sum of brain activity nanosecond before. Therefore that would mean that we do not have free will. But if we do have this 'ability', where does it come from?

Computers do not have this ability of free decision. But can they have it? As previously said, I do not have much knowledge, but something tells me that computer program cannot be programmed to 'think' by itself. Of course the word 'think' is vague, as the great paper 'Imitation game' of Alan Turing shows - terms think, intelligent, machine have to be precisely defined. I do not think that creativity and human like intelligence can be created from silicon chips. The same way chess game of computer against human cannot be won only by brute force of computation thousands of possible steps. There has to be some element of intelligence both in the software and the hardware.

If we look at the power of brain it is many times less than the electrical power of a computer. There is some element that makes the structure of brain intelligent itself. If the intelligent roots and bases of any program or machine are found/created then the result can behave intelligently itself.

If a program is dully programmed then it will behave dully, but when intelligence is created in its structure it will behave intelligently. Question is if it is the same case with hardware. Can we somehow structure hardware so it behaves intelligently? Of course I am here talking contradictory, because software in the end is hardware. Maybe I am talking about the debacle between GOFAI and other approaches to AI.

But I think this is maybe obvious, but to me it is a great reveal I found out - structure itself has to be intelligent in order to produce an intelligent behavior.

But where does intelligence come from indeed? In a great book of Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter nicely describes intelligence as the ability to recognize patterns. Of course he goes deeper than that. But I do think that this is the case.

Another question could be what is consciousness? How to know a person is conscious?

Lukas Cerny, 13. 2. 2015