Author(s)

Ron Cottam¹, Willy Ranson², Roger Vounckx¹

¹The Living Systems Project, Department of Electronics and Informatics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium.
²IMEC vzw, Leuven, Belgium.

The human mind’s evolution owes much to its companion phenomena of intelligence, sapience, wisdom, awareness and consciousness. In this paper we take the concepts of intelligence and sa-pience as the starting point of a route towards elucidation of the conscious mind. There is much disagreement and confusion associated with the word intelligence. A lot of this results from its use in diverse contexts, where it is called upon to represent different ideas and to justify different ar-guments. Addition of the word sapience to the mix merely complicates matters, unless we can relate both of these words to different concepts in a way which acceptably crosses contextual boundaries. We have established a connection between information processing and processor “architecture” which provides just such a linguistic separation, and which is applicable in either a computational or conceptual form to any context. This paper reports the argumentation leading up to a distinction between intelligence and sapience, and relates this distinction to human “cognitive” activities. Information is always contextual. Information processing in a system always takes place between “architectural” scales: intelligence is the “tool” which permits an “overview” of the relevance of individual items of information. System unity presumes a degree of coherence across all the scales of a system: sapience is the “tool” which permits an evaluation of the relevance of both individual items and individual scales of information to a common purpose. This hyperscalar coherence is created through mutual inter-scalar observation, whose recursive nature generates the independence of high-level consciousness, making humans human. We conclude that intelligence and sapience are distinct and necessary properties of all information processing systems, and that the degree of their availability controls a system’s or a human’s cognitive capacity, if not its appli-cation. This establishes intelligence and sapience as prime ancestors of the conscious mind. How-ever, to our knowledge, there is no current mathematical approach which can satisfactorily deal with the native irrationalities of information integration across multiple scales, and therefore of formally modeling the mind.

Hyperscale, Hierarchy, Intelligence, Sapience, Consciousness

Cottam, R. , Ranson, W. and Vounckx, R. (2015) Hyperscale Puts the Sapiens into Homo. International Journal of Intelligence Science, 5, 13-36. doi: 10.4236/ijis.2015.51003.