As the old adage goes, 'If you show me the heart of a man I can sell him anything.' But the tricky part is, no one is going to just go ahead and show you their heart because let's face it, they know you're going to try to sell them something 8 times out of 10. A person's intentions are one of the hardest things to understand. And the truth is, often people themselves aren't really aware of their own intentions. We are only aware of about 5-10% of what is going, the other 90% or so is hidden deep within our subconscious and unconscious minds.

Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary terms. At SFI we have been searching for the expression of these scientific interests in his novels and we maintain a furtive tally of their covert manifestations and demonstrations in his prose. Over the last two decades Cormac and I have been discussing the puzzles and paradoxes of the unconscious mind. Foremost among them, the fact that the very recent and "uniquely" human capability of near infinite expressive power arising through a combinatorial grammar is built on the foundations of a far more ancient animal brain. How have these two evolutionary systems become reconciled? Cormac expresses this tension as the deep suspicion, perhaps even contempt, that the primeval unconscious feels toward the upstart, conscious language. In this article Cormac explores this idea through processes of dream and infection. It is a discerning and wide-ranging exploration of ideas and challenges that our research community has only recently dared to start addressing through complexity science. I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé's is probably the best known.

Data mining has been a great way to get insights into our conscious decisions. But Dotin figured out that 95 percent of human decisions are made by the unconscious mind, and so the startup has developed a way to draw insights from those decisions. Ganesh Iyer, founder of Dotin, said in an email that the company has developed an artificial intelligence engine that can tap into the subconscious mind of humans and gain powerful business insights. The company is demoing the technology at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. The San Jose, Calif.-based company competes with the likes of IBM Watson, but Watson focuses more on people's conscious behavior.

Last March Microsoft released an AI bot called Tay which they were forced to close down within days of release. The reason was the bot learned from its users and then started to say unsavoury things. The bot had a deep learning neural network and was modifying itself according to its users behaviour. The developers took the bot down and started to try to modify its neural network software to prevent this happening. However, I think the problem is, that they are missing a software component, rather than needing to modify the neural net. In fact the neural net is behaving correctly.

Victor Allis in his article, 'One small step for computers, one giant step for AI', posed the question that becomes the subject of my enquiry. But I am also indebted to Roger Penrose and his seminal book, "The Emperor's new mind", which had influenced me in my life in more than one way. First of all on 21st April, we heard from Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO in his earnings call, the progress made by AlphaGo, "DeepMind's AlphaGo has been making great strides. It was a privilege to play legendary Go player, Lee Sedol, in such an important milestone for artificial intelligence", something that Victor's article was dedicated to. Indeed Penrose mentioned about the Oriental game Go in his book way back in 1989, while discussing about the strides made in the game of chess by computers.