Delving deep into the mysteries of human intelligence

The general nature of human intelligence and (eventually) its connection to the brain had been the subject of deep thought and inquiry for centuries. That humans have a remarkable ability for cognition: to think, to analyze, and to create, defined what it was to be human in an existential sense. The mystery of human intelligence has remained a subject of philosophical thought, presumably from unrecorded times.

What is it to be intelligent? What is it to be cognizant? What, indeed is cognition? In 1637 René Descartes summed up the flavor of the time on this subject in his famous statement “Cogito, ergo sum” (Latin; “I think, therefore I am”), although in a slightly different context.

Cogito, ergo sum, (Latin; “I think, therefore I am”) was a dictum coined 
by the French philosopher René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637)
as a first step in demonstrating the attainability of certain knowledge.
It is the only statement to survive the test of his methodic doubt. The 
statementis indubitable, as Descartes argued in the second of his six 
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), because even if an all-powerful 
demon wereto try to deceive him into thinking that he exists when he 
does not, he would have to exist in order for the demon to deceive him. 
Therefore, whenever he thinks, he exists. Furthermore, as he argued in his 
replies to critics in the second edition (1642) of the Meditations, the 
statement “I am” (sum) expresses an immediate intuition, not the conclusion
of a piece of reasoning (regarding the steps of which he could be deceived),
and is thus indubitable.
–Quoted from the Encyclopedia Brittanica        

How does the brain perform all of the feats of cognition? How, indeed do we actually produce intelligence? There was general consensus that this could be extremely difficult to understand because the problem is that the brain is an immensely complex organ. It has to be. As Marvin Minsky put it, if our brain was simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t have the intelligence to understand it!

Questions such as these led to different answers based on different lines of reasoning. All of these collectively fell into the category of models of cognition, which we discuss in the next article

1. Associationism
2. Connectionism

The above content is referred from

[1]Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj, Introduction to neural networks, in: Zenodo, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6848037.