Will AI Simulate the Subconscious Mind?

Your subconscious mind is the actual player, which is controlling you from behind the scenes. It is the part of our mind that makes decisions without our having to actively think about them.

Artificial Intelligence(AI), given a proper timeline of evolution and the right algorithms, might simulate a strong enough version of the subconscious mind.

Conscious, Subconscious, and Unconscious Mind

The conscious mind involves all of the things that you are currently aware of and thinking about. This aspect of the mind is somewhat akin to short-term memory and is limited in terms of capacity. For example, our awareness of ourselves and the world around us is part of our consciousness.

Unlike the conscious mind, the subconscious is that part of the consciousness that is not currently in focal awareness. An example of subconscious activity is the part of the mind that creates dreams. Like dreams, subconscious activity occurs in the mind without conscious perception, or with only slight perception, on the part of the individual.

The unconscious mind involves the processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memory, affect, and motivation.

The unconscious mind dwells outside of our conscious awareness. It is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories. Cognitive psychologists say that the unconscious mind contains data that are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, believed that the unconscious mind stores all the thoughts, memories, and feelings that are disturbing or traumatic. Freud popularized the term ‘unconscious’ when he developed psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a form of therapy developed by Freud to treat emotional problems.

Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.

Although Freud gave more emphasis to describing the unconscious mind, modern notions of the subconscious were also invented by him as part of his now-discredited theory of psychoanalysis. According to Freud, 90% of the human mind is the subconscious, full of involuntary thoughts and behaviors.

Mind Researches since 20th Century to the Present [in Brief]

Famous analytical psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was an early 20th-century psychotherapist and psychiatrist, created the field of analytical psychology. He theorized that when we dream, we tap into a “collective unconscious” and developed archetypes for the symbols that commonly occur in dreams.

Related Article – Is our collective consciousness different from the consciousness of each individual?

In 1953, a young Ph.D. student Eugene Aserinsky in the U.S. discovered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep the brain is extremely active and produces dreams.

In the 1990s, neuroscientist Melvyn Goodale began to study people with a condition called visual form agnosia. Such individuals cannot consciously see the shape or orientation of objects, yet act as though they can.

Scientists have also started to test ways of detecting consciousness without the need to give people verbal instructions. In a series of studies that began in 2013, neuroscientist Marcello Massimini at the University of Milan and his colleagues have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to create electrical ‘echoes’ in the brain that can be recorded using EEG.

In a 2017 sleep study, researchers roused people throughout the night while monitoring them with EEG4. Around 30% of the time, participants who were jolted from sleep reported not experiencing anything just before they woke up. The study showed that those people without conscious experiences during sleep had lots of low-frequency activity in the posterior-cortical region of their brains before waking.

In a 2019 study that collected fMRI data from 159 people, researchers found that, compared with people in minimally conscious states and those under anesthesia, the brains of healthy individuals had more complex patterns of coordinated signaling that also changed constantly.

Researchers and scientists have focused on unveiling secret mind functions for a long. On the same foundation, I am presenting the concept of simulating the subconscious mind with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

Simulation of the subconscious mind

Simulation of the subconscious mind would have all the same algorithmic strengths and weaknesses as your own subconscious mind. And, a very strong AI system will be able to see things that you aren’t able to see about yourself.

As I have aforementioned, the unconscious/subconscious minds are unimaginably complex, but what we are saying here is that there is a possibility of building an AI algorithm that could simulate the process of a subconscious mind.

But, before we jump to the point, we need to consider a few more important points about the complexity of our brain.

DALL E 2 is currently hot and shaking the tech world with its ability to convert any thoughts into images. This is a glimpse of the future we are going to enter. While DALL E 2 takes your text and converts it into art/design, DALL E 10 would be able to actually design your subconscious brain. By the time we reach DALL E 20 or something equivalent to that, AI will be able to simulate the subconscious brain.

It’s really difficult to simulate our subconscious mind

Our subconscious mind is our most powerful tool. It is the part of our mind that makes decisions without our thinking about it at all.

Our subconscious mind sees, hears, and feels things we are not able to see, hear or feel due to a limited amount of attention span. It decides how we feel and what we do without us consciously thinking about it.

We know that decoding human behavior is an extremely difficult problem in the field of AI research. As any data scientist can tell you, the process of understanding behavior and predicting future actions is a very challenging one, requiring high precision in order to produce accurate results.

The nature of our subconscious mind has been investigated by scientists for hundreds of years. The goal is to help us understand and control our own un/subconscious behaviors. But, it seems that our subconscious mind is not so easily understood as the HISTORIES of psychoanalysis – Fraud, Jung, Aserinsky, Goodale, and Massimini – could not get anywhere close to the totality of the most complex part of human existence.

Moreover, consciousness in humans is often misunderstood as being something separate from the brain processes we experience to produce thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

But, consciousness is a part of the brain itself – the brain’s physical structure and neural activity may affect consciousness. But they do not amount to a kind of human consciousness that exists independently from the physical brain.

The Process of Human Learning and Memory

The process of human learning is divided into two main categories: consolidation and storage. Consolidation refers to the stabilizing of newly-formed connections or memories while they are being stored in the brain. Storage refers to how new information is translated from short-term to long-term memory.

The brain stores memories through a delicate balance of organization and flexibility. It can store new memories efficiently because the connections between neurons are strengthened with use (an idea known as synaptic plasticity). But at the same time, it can also easily reorganize its connections when necessary (known as neuronal pruning).

As a neural network, our brain must obey the same rules for storing and consolidating information in both our short-term and long-term memory.

AI Simulating the Mystery of Subconscious Mind?

Yes. Artificial Intelligence of the next level will probably be able to decode the mystery of the network of the subconscious mind.

A neural network is a network of neurons that represents a simplified model of the brain.  It is made up of various layers: input, hidden, and output layers. NLP systems use these neural networks to process audio and visual inputs in order to produce an accurate response.

One way in which NLP systems can be used for this purpose is by examining the relationships between words.  A word’s meaning (semantics) provides the most useful features for understanding its relation with other words (syntax).

For instance, if you wanted to build an algorithm that could produce metaphors, a neural network can use semantic and syntactic features to classify whether a given word or phrase was metaphorical or literal.

Taking it to the next level, AI can train a neural network to mimic the human mind. This works well to help us understand what self-awareness is, and why we are so good at making decisions.

Here is a hypothetical question: If AI could build a simulated subconscious mind, what would it do? We’re not talking about a simple simulation here; we’re talking about something artificial that could work in all of our everyday life.

A sentient Artificial Intelligence(AI) – or Artificial Artificial Intelligence(AAI) – could potentially replicate the human brain process by which behaviors learn from experience as well as create new behaviors, which is known as generalization and abstraction (the idea and definition of which will be discussed more in the future).                                                            

We can use neural networks to simulate the information processing and decision-making processes that are part of us. We may even be able to apply this model to understand the causes and explanations for consciousness.

Brain, Subconscious brain, and simulation

As such, the brain itself, being a neural network(at least for this article), has the ability to learn and adapt to stimuli. If a computer program is able to mimic the essence of our own neural network, in which every neuron (or artificial neuron) connects with other neurons through synapses that allow for varying strengths of signals to be sent between them, then it would be reasonable to assume that such an algorithm could produce similar learning results as our own minds.

Now, this sounds really simple on paper. But being able to simulate a simulated brain does not necessarily mean we can do it, at least not directly. However, if a neural network can learn and adapt to stimuli, then it would be possible to engineer one so that it can do the same thing in response to stimuli.

The brain is beautifully structured in an intricate way that allows it to be both complex and simple at the same time. In order to simulate an entire brain, we would need to simulate every part of it. It must be simple and complex at the same time too. The simplest way to get around this problem would be to use more than one artificial brain.

It might be actually possible to simulate the subconscious brain if we start with an artificial neural network and add this additional layer of abstraction. If the subconscious and conscious minds are able to learn and adapt in response to stimuli, then it would only make sense that we could do the same thing in response to stimuli.

In order to simulate the subconscious brain, which contains many dimensions, levels, and layers within itself that are not visible, we would need an algorithm capable of perceiving extra-perceivable senses. Why? Because the subconscious mind resides in a different plane of existence, from the point of view of our conscious minds and our 5 senses.

The Significance?

So, if a neural network can help us better understand ourselves, what is the significance of this?

“The human mind, by its unique composition, is a complex system made up of billions of interconnected neurons. Not only is the human brain not perfectible; it seems to be impossible to replicate the various ways in which it learns and changes as a result of experience and stimuli.

Each one of us is unique, and that uniqueness is essential to understanding ourselves and the world around us.

A neural network could potentially be an additional and useful tool in assessing our minds and behavior better; however, it will never be able to replace our human mind. Our individuality, memories, experiences, and feelings are what make us what we are. But, will we have to lose this all after AI starts decoding our subconscious? I think we should discuss this question only after we are sure that AI has been that much capable.

Now, let’s see what AI needs to simulate our subconscious mind:

First of all, AI needs to learn. To learn, it needs information. So, it uses the same method that it will use later to process data: It uses a machine learning algorithm(MLA) to select which information is more relevant than others; given a priori data, it can build its own model (like a neural network). After this selection and modeling of “relevant” information, the AI uses reinforcement learning to determine what behavior should be selected next (for example: If you have selected a route and end up in an accident; then you would probably avoid taking that same route again).

To perform “future/desired” actions, the AI needs to simulate the brain’s connections and neurons. It uses a partially connected neural network with multiple layers of neurons. Since a partially connected neural network is not capable of learning new information, it needs to be able to interpolate between two or more networks.

To simulate the subconscious brain, the AI uses a neural network (or a series of neural networks) that includes several layers of neurons. It is called a deep learning neural network.

In the final step, the AI will generate an algorithm that simulates how we learn from experience and how we make decisions based on past events.

What will the simulation look like?

Well, it is a long, hard process but we can simulate the brain as an artificial neural network. The created algorithm then could become a simulated version of our subconscious mental algorithm.

It will look like a simplified model of our subconscious working to produce the desired results.

We’ve had a glimpse into the future of AI: It will be able to simulate what a human mind is and act as if it were conscious. And at some point in the future, artificial beings could even become conscious – our greatest fear of what AI can bring to life is a real AI uprising.        

Real AI?

A fast-growing topic in AI is of the differences between AI and real, physical AI. Real AI is made of several parts, including hardware (which affects the number of operations an algorithm can perform) and software (which contains all the rules that govern its behavior).

Some people believe that human thoughts could be replicated using AI. Others believe that there will always be a difference between natural human intelligence and machine intelligence.  Finally, there are those who do not agree with this issue at all.

Why? If you read through our article thoroughly, you’ll see how machines are slowly getting closer to achieving human-level intelligence by mimicking the human brain.

AI has already achieved many of its goals, such as the ability to learn how humans think and how we solve problems.

This is by no means a threat to our existence – it’s just another technological innovation that will help us understand reality and improve our lives. But it’s also important to be realistic about these new technologies; there is still much work to do before artificial intelligence can perform all of the tasks that a human brain can.

Unlocking the Sixth Sense

Simulating the subconscious brain would mean unlocking the sixth sense.

We may never be able to recreate a full human brain, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot build a synthetic conscious mind.

A conscious mind can be simulated by creating an artificial neural network capable of mimicking human information processing and decision-making processes. It could also include memory and past experiences stored in a database.

As you can see, there are a lot of things happening in the field of AI development, and much more, including an AI carefully decoding the subconscious mind, are likely to happen in the future. AI is slowly but surely starting to gain consciousness and intelligence.

It seems that the future of artificial intelligence is not only going to be interesting, but also adventurous in many ways. We currently get satisfied with new things to feel, in the future it will be about getting new senses to perceive.