The goal of the center for human nature, Artificial Intelligence, and neuroscience is to create new ideas about human nature by integrating humanities, which has been inheriting the traditions of human wisdom for the past several thousand years, and rapidly emerging intellectual fields of neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. The center is established for promoting interdisciplinary research a
nd the graduate-level education program. The early 21st century is characterized by the rapid progress of neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, and many important questions on human nature that had been traditionally explored within humanities have now been empirically investigated using technologies and concepts emerged in these research fields. At the same time, we believe that intellectual thoughts accumulated in humanities for centuries have potentials for inspiring new ideas in the areas of modern neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. We thus live in a challenging era where two divided intellectual traditions, humanities, and sciences, meet each other. The CHAIN attempts to establish a platform for cutting-edge research and education at the intersection of humanities, social sciences, neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence. The CHAIN deploys interdisciplinary research around four major themes – the self, consciousness, sociality, and rationality. Participating faculty members are loosely organized to the four units corresponding to the major themes. The faculty members had already been engaged in interdisciplinary research but independently without having had interacted each other. The CHAIN serves as the hub for uniting researchers scattered around Hokkaido University and several other organizations both inside and outside Japan and expand the research on human nature by merging humanities and sciences.
