This book was written from an engineer’s perspective of mind. So far, although quite a large amount of literature on the topic of the mind has appeared from various disciplines; in this research monograph, I have tried to draw a picture of the holistic model of an artificial mind system and its behaviour, as concretely as possible, within a unified context, which could eventually lead to practical realisation in terms of hardware or software. With a view that “mind is a system always evolving”, ideas inspired/motivated from many branches of studies related to brain science are integrated within the text, i.e. artificial intelligence, cognitive science/psychology, connectionism, consciousness studies, general neuroscience, linguistics, pattern recognition/data clustering, robotics, and signal processing. The intention is then to expose the reader to a broad spectrum of interesting areas in general brain science/mind-oriented studies.

I decided to write this monograph partly because now I think is the right time to reflect at what stage we currently are and then where we should go towards the development of “brain-style” computers, which is counted as one of the major directions conducted by the group of “creating the brain” within the brain science institute, RIKEN. Although I have done my best, I admit that for some parts of the holistic model only the frameworks are given and the descriptions may be deemed to be insufficient. However, I am inclined to say that such parts must be heavily dependent upon specific purposes and should be developed with careful consideration during the domain-related design process (see also the Statements to be given next), which is likely to require material outside of the scope of this book. Moreover, it is sometimes a matter of dispute whether a proposed approach/model is biologically plausible or not. However, my stance, as an engineer, is that, although it may be sometimes useful to understand the underlying principles and then exploit them for the development of the “artificial” mind system, only digging into such a dispute will not be so beneficial for the development, once we set our ultimate goal to construct the mechanisms instance, only about the biological plausibility of an airplane; an artificial object that can fly, but not like a bird.) Hence, the primary objective of this monograph is not to seek such a plausible model but rather to provide a basis for imitating the functionalities.

On the other hand, it seems that the current trend in general connectionism rather focuses upon more and more sophisticated learning mechanisms or their highly-mathematical justifications without showing a clear direction/evidence of how these are related to imitating such functionalities of brain/mind, which many times brought me a simple question, “Do we really need to rely on such highly complex tools, for the pursuit of creating the virtual brain/mind?” This was also a good reason to decide writing the book. Nevertheless, I hope that the reader enjoys reading it and believe that this monograph will give some new research opportunities, ideas, and further insights in the study of artificial intelligence, connectionism, and the mind. Then, I believe that the book will provide a ground for the scientific communications amongst various relevant disciplines.