Theory of Cognitive Relativity: A Promising Paradigm for True AI

The rise of deep learning has brought artificial intelligence (AI) to the forefront. The ultimate goal of AI is to realize a machine with human mind and consciousness, but existing achievements mainly simulate intelligent behavior on computer platforms. These achievements all belong to weak AI rather than strong AI. How to achieve strong AI is not known yet in the field of intelligence science. Currently, this field is calling for a new paradigm, especially Theory of Cognitive Relativity (TCR). The TCR aims to summarize a simple and elegant set of first principles about the nature of intelligence, at least including the Principle of World's Relativity and the Principle of Symbol's Relativity. The Principle of World's Relativity states that the subjective world an intelligent agent can observe is strongly constrained by the way it perceives the objective world. The Principle of Symbol's Relativity states that an intelligent agent can use any physical symbol system to describe what it observes in its subjective world. The two principles are derived from scientific facts and life experience. Thought experiments show that they are important to understand high-level intelligence and necessary to establish a scientific theory of mind and consciousness. Other than brain-like intelligence, it indeed advocates a promising change in direction to realize true AI, i.e. strong AI with artificial consciousness, particularly different from humans' and animals'. Furthermore, a TCR creed has been presented and extended to reveal the secrets of consciousness and to guide realization of conscious machines. In the sense that true AI could be diversely implemented in a brain-different way, the TCR would probably drive an intelligence revolution in combination with some other first principles.