We are pleased to invite you to two seminars by Prof. Soo Hong CHEW (National University of Singapore), to be held on December 24, 2025 (Wednesday) at T7-106, hosted by the International Centre for Resilient Supply Chains and the Behavioral and Decision Research Lab.

Lunch Seminar:

(For the lunch seminar, we need to estimate the number of participants for catering purposes, so please register in advance. You may sign up by scanning the QR code on the attached poster or by logging into the MIS Survey system (https://mis.bnbu.edu.cn/survey/) before12:00 on Dec. 23. Seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.)

Time: 12:00–13:30

Venue: T1-302-R1

Title:

Energy Darwinism: From Big Bang to Intelligence

Abstract:

This talk traces a unifying story from the Big Bang to intelligence — a story of how the universe learns to think by economizing energy. Beginning at hydrothermal vents where proton gradients powered the first metabolic reactions, life emerged as nature’s earliest accounting system, turning energy management into a survival strategy. From these chemical beginnings arose the first information molecules — acetylcholine and serotonin — encoding primitive “Go” and “Wait” decisions. Evolution then expanded its chemical toolkit with dopamine and norepinephrine, adding reward and alertness, and subsequently accelerated the flow of information through electrical signaling and the rise of cephalized brains. Intelligence, in this view, is evolution’s solution to energy scarcity: the capacity to sense, perceive, choose and yet conserve.

Afternoon Seminar:

Time: 14:00–15:30

Venue: T7-106-R1

Title:

Intelligence, Situation Awareness, and Context Sensitive Choice: From Brain Plasticity to Consciousness to Incentive

Abstract:

Intelligence refers to the ability to perceive situations in general, acting appropriately, deciding among perceived options, towards accomplishing goals (Chew and Ebstein, 2025). In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890) describes consciousness as a“stream", a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Robert Aumann (2024) argues that consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentive, underpinning goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Auman leaves open the question of“How" which we address by relying on brain plasticity at the synaptic level. We hypothesize that the experience of incentive emerges from the modulation of synaptic plasticity respectively by the gain- and loss-oriented neurochemicals of dopamine and serotonin. We further associate the attention function in Attention Weighted Utility (AWU–Chew, 1983; Chew, Wang, Zhong, 2025) with the pair of neurochemicals–acetylcholine and norepinephrine–modulating top-down attention and bottom-up salience respectively. This delivers a neurobiological foundation for AWU, which is being applied to model context sensitive choice arising from changing as well as increasing awareness (Karni, Viero, 2013).

Speaker:

Prof. Soo Hong Chew is the Director of the Research Center for Intelligent Economy at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and a Chair Professor in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), and is internationally recognized as a leading scholar in behavioral and experimental economics. He received his degree from the University of British Columbia in 1981. His work has been published in top international economics journals, including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Theory, Management Science, and International Economic Review. He has also published extensively in leading journals in biology and neuroscience, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neuron, Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and NeuroImage.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at decisionlab@bnbu.edu.cn.