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9.6 Body and Mind
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intelligent subsystems, including those associated with the gut, the heart, the liver, the immune and endocrine systems, and the perceptual and motor cortices.

In the perspective underlying this book, the human cognitive cortex – or the core cognitive network of any roughly human-like AGI system – should be viewed as a highly flexible, self-organizing network. These cognitive networks are modelable e.g. as a recurrent neural net with general topology, or a weighted labeled hypergraph, and are centrally concerned with recognizing patterns in its environment and itself, especially patterns regarding the achievement of the system’s goals in various appropriate contexts. Here we augment this perspective, noting that the human brain’s cognitive network is closely coupled with a variety of simpler and more specialized intelligent "body-system networks" which provide it with structural and dynamical inductive biasing. We then discuss the implications of this observation for practical AGI design.

One recalls Pascal’s famous quote "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows not." As we now know, the intuitive sense that Pascal and so many others have expressed, that the heart and other body systems have their own reasons, is grounded in the fact that they actually do carry out simple forms of reasoning (i.e. intelligent, adaptive dynamics), in close, sometimes cognitively valuable, coordination with the central cognitive network.

9.6.2.1 Some of the Human Body’s Specialized Intelligent Subsystems

The human body contains multiple specialized intelligences apart from the cognitive cortex. Here we review some of the most critical.

Hierarchies of Visual and Auditory Perception

. The hierarchical structure of visual and auditory cortex has been taken by some researchers [Kur12], [HB06] as the generic structure of cognition. While we suspect this is overstated, we agree it is important that these cortices nudge large portions of the cognitive cortex to assume an approximately hierarchical structure.

Olfactory Attractors

. The process of recognizing a familiar smell is grounded in a neural process similar to convergence to an attractor in a nonlinear dynamical system [Fre95]. There is evidence that the mammalian cognitive cortex evolved in close coordination with the olfactory cortex [Row11], and much of abstract cognition reflects a similar dynamic of gradually coming to a conclusion based on what initially "smells right."

Physical and Cognitive Action

. The cerebellum, a specially structured brain subsystem which controls motor movements, has for some time been understood to also have involvement in attention, executive control, language, working memory, learning, pain, emotion, and addiction [PSF09].

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