The Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN) An international symposium in November 2019.
Integrating wisdoms and exploring the frontiers The Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN) was established as Japan’s only research center specializing in hybrid research and education in the humanities, social sciences, neuroscience and AI. With the mission to create new knowledge on the nature of human existence, the Center conducts research and education taking advantage of the strengths and characteristics of Hokkaido University as a leading research university. In July 2019, the Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN) was established as a university facility and it launched its activities. CHAIN’s mission is to provide interdisciplinary research and education that integrate arts and sciences at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., to be a place where new knowledge is generated. Led by its director, Professor Shigeru Taguchi, CHAIN has five full-time specially appointed faculty members, three postdoctoral fellows, and 28 part-time faculty members from ten departments of the university. “By ‘human nature’, I am pointing to a new field of inquiry concerning the question of what it means to be human,” says Director Taguchi. “Research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence is moving into the territory of the humanities and social sciences.” Self-awareness is an example. How do
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Litterae Populi Spring 2021
I appear to other people? How can I know this when I am not these others? We can approach such questions through science. Thus new knowledge emerges out of an interaction among philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences, one of the internal partners of CHAIN, owns a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device exclusively for experimental use, with which researchers can probe into the brain activities of subjects as they perform various tasks. Using this device, researchers in CHAIN have carried out neuroscientific experiments on the consciousness of self and other. They have also conducted simulation experiments using deep learning. The CHAIN team is running an AI with a “superimposition mechanism” in a virtual environment to reconstruct the process by which the distinction between self and other emerges as a result of learning through a simple and universal mechanism.
