General Definitions of Information, Intelligence, and Consciousness from the Perspective of Generalized Natural Computing

Abstract

Atoms themselves have no thoughts and cannot be thinking. Why does the human body, which is composed of atoms, have consciousness? The widely used concepts of information and intelligence in today’s science, which are related to this, do not yet have appropriate general definitions. Answering these interesting questions is a crucial issue for technological development in the historical context of human society entering the era of intelligence. The key lies in how to fully utilize the existing fundamental theories subtly related to information science. Here we attempt to give the definition of general information and general intelligence from the perspective of generalized natural computing, based on the least action principle, Hamilton-Jacobi equation, dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, and point out the relationship between the two. The least action principle for describing conservative systems can be seen as an intelligent manifestation of natural matter, and its equivalent form, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, can be extended to describe quantum phenomena and is a special case of continuous dynamic programming equations. Dynamic programming is an efficient optimization method under deterministic models, while reinforcement learning, as a manifestation of biological intelligence, is its model-free version. The statement that reinforcement learning is the most promising machine learning method has a profound physical foundation. General information is defined as the degree to which a certain environmental element determines the behavior of the subject. General intelligence is defined as the automatic optimization ability of the action or value function of a system with a certain degree of conservatism. Intelligence is a basic property of material systems, rather than an emergent property that only complex systems possess. Consciousness is an advanced intelligent phenomenon, a reconstruction of quasi conservative systems based on complex systems.