Abstract
The human mind’s evolution owes much to its companion phenomena of intelligence, sapience, wisdom, awareness and consciousness. In this paper we take the concepts of intelligence and sa-pience as the starting point of a route towards elucidation of the conscious mind. There is much disagreement and confusion associated with the word intelligence. A lot of this results from its use in diverse contexts, where it is called upon to represent different ideas and to justify different ar-guments. Addition of the word sapience to the mix merely complicates matters, unless we can relate both of these words to different concepts in a way which acceptably crosses contextual boundaries. We have established a connection between information processing and processor “architecture” which provides just such a linguistic separation, and which is applicable in either a computational or conceptual form to any context. This paper reports the argumentation leading up to a distinction between intelligence and sapience, and relates this distinction to human “cognitive” activities. Information is always contextual. Information processing in a system always takes place between “architectural” scales: intelligence is the “tool” which permits an “overview” of the relevance of individual items of information. System unity presumes a degree of coherence across all the scales of a system: sapience is the “tool” which permits an evaluation of the relevance of both individual items and individual scales of information to a common purpose. This hyperscalar coherence is created through mutual inter-scalar observation, whose recursive nature generates the independence of high-level consciousness, making humans human. We conclude that intelligence and sapience are distinct and necessary properties of all information processing systems, and that the degree of their availability controls a system’s or a human’s cognitive capacity, if not its appli-cation. This establishes intelligence and sapience as prime ancestors of the conscious mind. How-ever, to our knowledge, there is no current mathematical approach which can satisfactorily deal with the native irrationalities of information integration across multiple scales, and therefore of formally modeling the mind.
Highlights
There is much disagreement and confusion associated with the word intelligence
But if intelligence is a tool for survival, what is sapience: merely more of the same thing? If such were the case, it would be difficult to justify the addition of yet another technical term to the cognitive domain, which is already saturated with contextually-ambiguous terminology
It should be evident that we are not limiting ourselves to a proposition that “consciousness is the ultimate emergence of networked intelligent processing”, but that “consciousness” is more or less a property of all information processing: Tononi [29] [30] maintains that consciousness is equivalent to the integration of information. This does not preclude the generation of a degree of consciousness within the confines of a real neural network which is impossible at lower information-processing densities [24]—only that this kind of “high-level” consciousness is only ever generated within a hyperscalar environment. Nor does this suggest that we should be able to be aware of different levels of our own mind’s consciousness: all of these would be subsumed into the transparency of hyperscale, where the only “different levels” we observe are ones that we internally “permit to exist”: ego naturally resolves the problem, by insisting that there is “me and only me”! Even so, intelligence requires an observational capacity at its own level; sapience does too; even the interactions of apparently “Newtonian” particles do: “unconscious” cognitive processing is maybe not so unconscious after all!
Summary
There is much disagreement and confusion associated with the word intelligence. A lot of this results from its use in diverse contexts, where it is called upon to represent different ideas and to justify different arguments. In the work leading up to this, following paper we have established a connection between information processing and processor “architecture”, which provides linguistic separation between intelligence and sapience, and which is applicable in either a computational or a conceptual form to any context. We live within hyperscale: intelligence is how we get there; sapience is how we remain there On its own, this statement will convey little, but our task in this introduction is clear: it is to explain what this short conclusion means before delving into the technical arguments which lead up to it. Our belief in the “correctness” of the information these devices provide depends on our belief in the “correctness” of the modeling chains outwards from our own scale which we use to build them, to understand their operation and to. Whether we are basing our considerations on “real” parametric sizes or “abstract” (model) parametric sizes, the same restriction holds—we can’t escape the implications of perceptional scale in any simplistic mechanical manner
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