About the name:

Noesis is thought, and autonoetic means self-aware or self-perceiving. I chose it as a sort of joke on a website being self-conscious, and because of a fascination with this concept, and that of consciousness, and a curiosity about what exactly is required to have these faculties. Most agree that animals with brains are in some way conscious. Self-awareness is a much more exclusive club, with some believing that advanced animals such as dolphins have it. We know there's nothing all that special about the hardware of a brain; each neuron is just a switch, with input connections and the potential for an output firing, and among many interconnections neurons somehow get organized into departments that do different jobs, in roughly the same arrangement in each person (although it's been seen that the arrangement is flexible if parts get damaged). So what exactly is making us conscious? The only answers that seem to make any sense are that it requires a certain level of complexity of the brain, i.e. a number of neurons, or that we have a soul. As for self-perception, the number-of-neurons seems like the only possible answer, strange though it is.

Nothing theoretical is stopping us from making a computer simulation of the brain hardware, using Artifical Neural Nets. These nets are simulations that mimic the structure of neurons and the connections between them, with inputs, processing, and outputs. A true artificial mind of human-level complexity would be a huge net, much more complex than any that is used in the field of AI today, and might take a lot of computing power, but that's it. To make it like an animal, we could even hook it up the right way to inputs representing the senses. Aside from these hookups, we would not "tell" it how to do anything through special programming. If this never worked, it would be the best logical argument I can see for the existence of a soul, although one would have to prove that the experiment didn't fail for some other more earthly reason. Whether or not the soul is something that should be investigated logically is a separate matter!

As for self-awareness, its origins are equally mysterious and it somehow seems unlikely that one could come up with a simple neuron count required for it. Perhaps there is a certain "department" of the brain that is required for it. I won't comment on this further and expose my ignorance of neurology and cognitive science, which I intend to rectify.

I find people's reactions to these ideas interesting. Many people, without realizing they are taking a questionable logical step, presume that any conscious or self-aware program would inevitably produce a "War Games" or "Terminator 3" scenario, despite the benevolent intentions of the human designer. For this to be true, the program would need to have both the ability and the desire to do this. I don't see why it would be so hard to deprive itof the ability, in terms of physical connections or even pure intelligence, although objectors might throw some sort of Jeff-Goldblum-Jurassic-Park argument at me. I also don't see why it should have such evil desires: does every conscious being currently extant desire this? Again arguments could probably be made, but I don't think so.

An interesting aspect of this problem is computing power: currently, human brains are much faster and better than computers at some tasks, such as recognizing faces or creativity, while computers are much faster at "pure computation," if that means anything. Attempts have been made to come up with some kind of cycles-per-second quantity for our brains, but I believe it runs into difficulties with massive amounts of parallel processing. So what would happen with a computer simulation of a brain? Would it be very limited in speed because of the limited parallel processing capabilities of current CPUs? Would its top-level behavior look more like that of a human brain, or a computer? My suspicion is that it would look more like that of a human.

In summary, I would very much like to carry out the experiment described, and I think the potential to learn something new about such an amazing mystery far outweighs the possible danger that may have been placed in our heads by popular films. And that's the story of how I picked this domain name.