Speaker: Prof. Chew Soo Hong, National University of Singapore/ Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

Time: 13:00-14:30, May 16, 2025

Venue: Room 1113, Wangkezhen Building

Host: Jian Li

Abstract:

In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James describes consciousness as a "stream" -- a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In “Why Consciousness?”, Robert Aumann (2024) argues that consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentives underpinning all economic decision making, while leaving open the question of "How". Our answer to this question, built on brain plasticity at the synaptic level, delivers a measure of experiential consciousness in terms of the brain's information capacity (lC). The resulting relation between lC and the evolution of cephalized animals, from C. Elegans (302 neurons; 7000 synapses) to humans (86 billion neurons, hundreds of trillions of synapses), motivates our definition of intelligence in terms of the organism's ability to make good decisions to attain goals, i.e., survival of the smartest. Observe that goal intelligence (Gl) differentiates biological intelligence (incentivized to attain goals through decision making) from Al (which fulfills goals algorithmically). Gl is naturally applicable to research in economics, business, and social sciences in general, where decision quality has a pivotal role.

Bio:

Professor Chew Soo Hong is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Singapore and Chief Professor at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), and is recognized as a world-renowned experimental and behavioral economist. He has taught at the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Irvine, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Professor Chew has published over 60 academic papers in leading journals in economics and other disciplines, including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, Neuron, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Management Science.

2025-05-08