The Four Most Basic Elements In Machine Cognition
Authors: Li Deyi , Yin Jialun , Zhang Tianlei , Han Wei , Bao Hong 
Published: July 2024

The widespread use of ChatGPT has normalized the dialogue Turing test. To meet this challenge, China's major national development strategy suggests that for a new generation of artificial intelligence, it is first necessary to answer the big questions raised by Turing in 1950 from the perspective of cognitive physics: Can machines think? How do machines think? How do machines cognize? Whether it is carbon-based human cognition or silicon-based machine cognition, it is an interaction between complex constructs composed of the four most basic elements: matter, energy, structure, and time. Both humans and machines depend on negative entropy for living, and time is the cornerstone of cognition. Structure and time are parasitic on matter and energy in physical space, forming hard-structured ware. The soft-structured ware in cognitive space is mind, which is parasitic on the hard-structured ware or other existing soft-structured ware, and constitutes a rich hierarchy of multi-scale feelings, concepts, information, and knowledge. Extending “abstraction” from the symbolic school of artificial intelligence, “association” from the connectionist school, and “interaction” from the behaviorist school, the core of cognition is established on the shoulders of such scientific giants such as Schrödinger, Turing and Wiener. Soft and hard-structured ware interact. Cognitive machine can comprise heterogeneous hard-structured ware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), data processing units (DPUs), central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs), and memory. It can also be implanted with the “Baby Cognitive Nucleus” which is hard-structured ware genetically inherited and naturally evolved to form the embodied machine. Then the hard-structured ware is parasitized by rich, multi-scale soft-structured ware. By regulating matter and energy through soft-structured ware, machines produce orderly events, form coordinated and orderly thinking activities. The heterogeneous sensors configured by the machine and the speed of thinking will no longer be trapped by the extreme values of biochemical parameters of carbon-based organisms but will be able to perceive through multi-channel cross-modal means, carry out intense thinking, and maintain cognitive continuity with memory. To generate computational and memory intelligence in cognitive space which can bootstrap, self-reuse and self-replicate, imagination and creativity are improved through memory-constrained computing. The new generation of artificial intelligence will leap beyond mechanized mathematics to automation in thinking and self-driven growth of cognition, and the thinking in the cognitive space and the behavior in the physical space verify each other, from the dialogue Turing test to the embodied Turing test. Humans have entered the intelligent era of human-machine co-creation with cognitive machines iteratively inventing, discovering, and creating alongside scientists, engineers, and skilled craftsmen, each wise in its way, improving thinking ability, and amplifying human energy.