北大经院工作坊第1145场| Intelligence Darwinism
——Brain Plasticity, Consciousness, and Survival of the Smartest
（发展与公共财政工作坊）
主讲人：周恕弘（西南财经大学智慧经济科学研究中心主任、新加坡国立大学荣休教授）
参与老师：
（北大经院）刘冲、吴群锋、曹光宇、年永威
（北大国发院）李力行、席天扬、徐化愚、于航、王轩、易君健、黄清扬
（北大光华管理学院）张晓波、仇心诚
时间：2025年9月17日（周三）10:30-12:00
地点：北京大学国家发展研究院承泽园245教室
主讲人简介：
周恕弘，新加坡国立大学荣休教授、西南财经大学智慧经济科学研究中心主任，计量经济学会院士、经济学理论促进学会(SAET)院士(Fellow)，著名的决策论以及实验经济学家和行为经济学家，曾执教于美国亚利桑那大学、约翰·霍普金斯大学、加州大学尔湾分校、香港科技大学。其在经济学以及其他学科顶级权威期刊比如Econometrica、Journal of Political Economy、Review of Economic Studies、Journal of Economic Theory、Journal of the European Economic Association、Neuron、Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences、Management Science等发表过论文七十余篇。
摘要： In The Principles of Psychology, James (1890) describes consciousness as a “stream” – a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Aumann (2024) argues that such experiential consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentives, which underpins goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Aumann leaves open the question of “How” which we address by relying on brain plasticity at the synaptic level. We hypothesize that the experience of incentive emerges from the modulation of synaptic plasticity respectively by the gain and loss oriented neuromodulators of dopamine and serotonin. Working in tandem with another pair of neuromodulators, acetylcholine and norepinephrine which modulate top-down attention and bottom-up salience respectively yields a stimulus-driven sensory component to how we perceive choice situations, leading to inherently context-sensitive decision making behavior.
Brain plasticity at the synaptic level yields a measure of brain's information capacity (BIC), the ability to store and retrieve information through dynamic synaptic connectivity. The resulting relation between BIC 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 (goal) intelligence (GI) in terms of the animal's ability to make quality decisions to attain goals. Observe that GI applies naturally to research in economics, business, and social sciences in general where decision quality has a pivotal role. Extending GI to collective intelligence (CI) leads to a deeper understanding of adaptation in terms of matching CI with environment for the species. This Intelligence Darwinism shapes natural selection through inter- and intra-species competition thereby delivering survival of the smartest.
供稿单位：科研与博士后办公室
供稿人：刘冲 黄海
