Professor Jun’ichi Takeno, one of the leading experts in exploring of the nature of consciousness and mind, has told about why he and his team are trying to create a computer analogue of the human intellect, and how these studies can help biologists to reveal the most important secrets of human evolution.

For more than 10 years Takeno, Professor at the University of Meiji in Tokyo, and his colleagues are working to create machines with some forms of consciousness and mind and which can work on the same principles as the human brain. In 2005 his team created a robot able to see himself in a mirror — one of the first tests for the presence of consciousness, which today could be passed only by a man, chimpanzee, jays, and monkeys.

In subsequent years, Takeno and his associates have created a series of robots that can recognize and show different emotions, simulate actions of human beings and other robots, as well as to make their own decisions. All this, according to the scientist, brings us closer to the creation of a complete intelligent machine, indistinguishable from a man in their way of thinking.

Takeno told about the latest achievements in this field, speaking at an international conference BICA-2017, which was held in Moscow for the first time with the active support and participation of MEPhI. He announced the creation of a system of artificial intelligence, which sees the famous "Rubin's vase" – mixed picture, which at the same time depicting a pair of dark faces and a bright vase – in much the same way as a human.

— Jun'ichi, many of your colleagues believe that it is impossible to create a full analogue of the human mind and a self-aware machine, because the mind has a quantum nature. Is that true?

— It is a very difficult question, but it seems to me that human consciousness can be represented in the form of a program. Of course this program is very unorthodox, it is very unusual as it was being written by the evolution in the “genetic code” for many millions of years, and it can only work on the hardware, which we do not fully understand yet.

In order to write a program that works in the same way, my colleagues and I are now actively studying the nature of human consciousness, using publications, which was prepared by our colleagues – neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists and other scientists. These works have provided us with food for thought and allowed to make considerable progress in writing the program.

For example, once the Russian Nobel laureate Pavlov wrote that “consciousness is a brain function, that is, organized in a special way matter”, and confirmed this statement by experiments with dogs.

On the other hand, the nature of human consciousness, as it is often said, remains almost unexplored. We're trying to solve the mystery, moving from the other side: we study how our brain and our consciousness work, creating their likeness. Many people don't want to do it in principle, but I think they're wrong.

Today a human is the most intelligent creature on Earth, and, therefore, it’s extremely difficult to understand how our own intelligence works. But it’s necessary to study it, as if intelligent robots and machines suddenly appear among us, then there will be a very dangerous situation.

Not understanding how our mind works, how our own genetic program is organized, we will not be able to predict actions of such machines and to protect against them. In addition, people want to know themselves from a purely philosophical point of view, and therefore such studies will always have meaning and value, whatever skeptics say.

— You have created a program that is able to react to Rubin's vase and other ambiguous picture as people do. Can we talk that it is an analogue of human consciousness?

— Now we are somewhere in the middle, so to speak. In the past we have created an analogue of a single human thought – the MoNAD system – an analog of a recursive neural network of the human brain. This time we used it in order to explain why a person thinks that he sees two different things, people's faces and the vase, simultaneously and how associative memory works.

Of course, you need to understand that all such explanations is a hypothesis, but these studies help us gradually solve the mystery of the brain by studying relatively small problems one by one.

For example, in the past our main task was to create a system that could spontaneously recognize themselves in the mirror like all sentient beings with consciousness. Having reached this milestone, we have begun to solve the following problem, developing a machine that can recognize and generate emotions.

— Taking into account this progress, when will you and your colleagues reach the point when we will be able to talk about full-fledged intelligent machine?

— The thing that we already have has already been working in some way like the human brain. On the other hand, we realize that we know just some basic things about consciousness and intelligence. Both of them are extremely complex things, our colleagues are constantly discovering some new qualities and properties of the brain, which have yet to be explored.

I think, the future will be the same – we will discover new processes and properties of the brain, which we know nothing about now. Therefore, the creation of a full analogue of the human mind and consciousness is likely to last forever.

The same thing, in fact, is typical for science – every time when scientists think that the "physics" or "biology" are over, they discover something new that fundamentally changes our view of the world.

For example, the first mechanical clocks appeared at the end of the middle ages, and over the next six hundred years their design was repeatedly improved and remade. The same applies to the study of the human mind. The only thing that matters is that we should pay maximum attention to the safety conducting such research.