ABSTRACT
Values, goals and utility play a central role both in formal psychology and in everyday life. This chapter explains how our understanding of these concepts can be further unified and enriched, based on a new engineering-based theory of mammalian intelligence. It discusses three strategic issues: consciousness versus intelligence; prior information versus learning; and neural networks versus computational neuroscience. The chapter describes the new theory of intelligence. The new theory can be seen as a hybrid between hierarchical task planning, as practiced in associative information (AI), and neural network designs based on reinforcement learning or adaptive critics. The neural network aspect provides a way to link the system to higher values and emotions, and to the brain. According to the new theory, the "middle level" of the brain is made up, in effect, of a library of "decision blocks”. In principle, each decision block is separate from every other block.
