The human mental capacity is lauded as the apex of physiological complexity. With myriad systems coordinated and guided both by instinct and conscious thought, the human mind expresses qualities that have not been duplicated in the known universe. Discussions about the similarities of mammalian or reptilian thought with human cognition leave an observer with the sense that an extraordinary gap exists between the most intelligent creatures and the average human. As thought has been codified in natural language, recorded by written record, and proliferated by the printing press, the human brain has achieved the ability to extend its passing thoughts to external storage. In the modern age, the human brain is seeking to not only extend its thought to persistent stores, but it is seeking to duplicate its capabilities and unique rationality with AI, or Artificial Intelligence. 

A brief survey of philosophy would uncover a common thread in religious, humanistic, and historical texts. Humans have tried to understand how humans think for millennia. Homo Sapien, or man the wise, has turned inward in a search for how it thinks. No definitive manual exists to guide a conscious mind through childhood and maturation, and any texts that exist are collective and intrinsically biased attempts at generalizing a particular experience of life. With the absence of an owner's manual, humans from different cultures have approached the topics of ontology, theory of being and becoming, and epistemology,theory of knowledge, differently. As humanity cultivated self-consciousness and expressed the understanding of understanding in literature, scientific and proverbial, the impulse to understand how it thinks matured into creating intelligent entities that have the same capacity as humans. That impulse has evolved into the nascent science of Artificial Intelligence. That is, humanity actively chose to implement the understanding of understanding in an external entity.

In light of the long historical preoccupation with self-understanding, AI is a recently created science. The original work in artificial intelligence began shortly after World War II, circa 1945 CE. Being a ripe field of discovery, AI quickly grew to encompass several sub-disciplines, including natural language processing, learning, perception, and robotics, to name a few. Given the ubiquity of the topic of human thought, the invention and growth of artificial intelligence is not surprising. The artificial intelligence impetus is that it "systematizes and automates intellectual tasks and is therefore potentially relevant to any sphere of human intellectual activity." [1]

Defining artificial intelligence is a difficult task and has been considered by many authors. Two recurring themes emerge from scientists in the field, thought/reasoning and behavior. More specifically, does a non-human entity think or act like a human? As research in the field matured, an additional layer was added. Does an artificially intelligent entity have to be similar to a human, or should the entity express rationality through computational models and avoid the mistakes of human thought? The following articles will delve into the cross-section of thinking like a human, acting like a human, thinking with pure rationality, and acting based on pure rationality.  

- Isaac Swindle

[1] RUSSELL, S. J., NORVIG, PETER (2003). ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: a modern approach. S.l.: PRENTICE HALL