Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
149 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
9 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
47 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
4 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
38 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

On Computational Mechanisms for Shared Intentionality, and Speculation on Rationality and Consciousness (2306.13657v2)

Published 3 Jun 2023 in cs.AI and q-bio.NC

Abstract: A singular attribute of humankind is our ability to undertake novel, cooperative behavior, or teamwork. This requires that we can communicate goals, plans, and ideas between the brains of individuals to create shared intentionality. Using the information processing model of David Marr, I derive necessary characteristics of basic mechanisms to enable shared intentionality between prelinguistic computational agents and indicate how these could be implemented in present-day AI-based robots. More speculatively, I suggest the mechanisms derived by this thought experiment apply to humans and extend to provide explanations for human rationality and aspects of intentional and phenomenal consciousness that accord with observation. This yields what I call the Shared Intentionality First Theory (SIFT) for rationality and consciousness. The significance of shared intentionality has been recognized and advocated previously, but typically from a sociological or behavioral point of view. SIFT complements prior work by applying a computer science perspective to the underlying mechanisms.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (139)
  1. Ralph Adolphs. The social brain: Neural basis of social knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 60:693–716, 2009.
  2. Igor L. Aleksander. Capturing consciousness in neural systems. In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2), pages 17–22, Brighton, UK, 1992.
  3. Animal Consciousness. In Max Vellmans and Susan Schneider, editors, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, chapter 5. Wiley, second edition, 2017.
  4. Emergence of shared intentionality is coupled to the advance of cumulative culture. PLoS Computational Biology, 11(10): e1004587, 2015.
  5. Bernard J. Baars. Global workspace theory of consciousness: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Progress in Brain Research, 150:45–53, 2005.
  6. Simon Baron-Cohen. The Evolution of a Theory of Mind. In Michael Corballis C and Stephen E. G. Lea, editors, The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1999.
  7. Conscious thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: How mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface. Psychological Review, 117(3):945–971, 2010.
  8. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, 1991.
  9. Derek Bickerton. Language and Species. University of Chicago Press, 1990.
  10. Derek Bickerton. Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. Macmillan, 2009.
  11. Dimensions of animal consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(10):789–801, 2020.
  12. Susan Blackmore. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2005.
  13. Piotr Boltuc. The philosophical issue in machine consciousness. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 1(1):155–176, 2009.
  14. Gist is the grist: Fuzzy-trace theory and the new intuitionism. Developmental Review, 10(1):3–47, 1990.
  15. Michael E. Bratman. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  16. Joshua W. Brown. The tale of the neuroscientists and the computer: Why mechanistic theory matters. Frontiers in neuroscience, 8:349, 2014.
  17. Understanding the higher-order approach to consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(9):754–768, 2019.
  18. Josep Call. Contrasting the social cognition of humans and nonhuman apes: The shared intentionality hypothesis. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2):368–379, April 2009.
  19. Susan Carey. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford University Press, 2009.
  20. Sidney Carls-Diamante. The octopus and the unity of consciousness. Biology & Philosophy, 32(6):1269–1287, 2017.
  21. Sidney Carls-Diamante. Where is it like to be an octopus? Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 16, 2022.
  22. Peter Carruthers and Peter K. Smith, editors. Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  23. Olivia Carter et al. Conscious machines: Defining questions. Science, 359(6374):400–400, 2018. Letter in response to [33].
  24. Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech. Nature Human Behavior, 7:430–441, March 2023.
  25. David J. Chalmers. Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200–219, 1995.
  26. A cognitive architecture for robot self-consciousness. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 44(2):147–154, 2008.
  27. Machine consciousness: A manifesto for robotics. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 1(01):33–51, 2009.
  28. Andy Clark. Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3):181–204, 2013.
  29. Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. International Journal of Systems Science, 1(2):89–97, 1970.
  30. Prediction error minimization as a framework for social cognition research. Erkenntnis, pages 1–20, 2018.
  31. Satisfiability modulo theories: Introduction and applications. Communications of the ACM, 54(9):69–77, 2011.
  32. Stanislas Dehaene. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes our Thoughts. Penguin, 2014.
  33. What is consciousness, and could machines have it? Science, 358(6362):486–492, 2017.
  34. Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Penguin UK, 1993.
  35. The nature of blindsight: Implications for current theories of consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 1:1–14, 2022.
  36. Jean-Louis Dessalles. Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, volume 5. Oxford University Press, 2007.
  37. Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness. Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(2):41–62, 2021.
  38. How animals collaborate: Underlying proximate mechanisms. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 11(5), 2020.
  39. Robin I.M. Dunbar. The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology, 6(5):178–190, 1998.
  40. Ian J. H. Duncan. The changing concept of animal sentience. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 100(1-2):11–19, 2006.
  41. On the origins of mind: A comparative perspective. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 4:63–87, 2022.
  42. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans and Keith E. Stanovich. Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3):223–241, 2013.
  43. Dean Falk. Finding our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and The Origins of Language. Basic Books, 2009.
  44. The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience. MIT Press, 2016.
  45. Frank A. Fishburn et al. Putting our heads together: Interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 13(8):841–849, 2018.
  46. A tutorial on variational Bayesian inference. Artificial Intelligence Review, 38:85–95, 2012.
  47. The internal model principle of control theory. Automatica, 12(5):457–465, 1976.
  48. Keith Frankish. Dual-process and dual-system theories of reasoning. Philosophy Compass, 5(10):914–926, 2010.
  49. Keith Frankish. Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12):11–39, 2016.
  50. Karl Friston. The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2):127, 2010.
  51. Predictive coding under the free-energy principle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences, 364(1521):1211–1221, 2009.
  52. Chris Frith. Consciousness is for other people. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(4):682–683, 1995.
  53. David Gamez. Progress in machine consciousness. Consciousness and cognition, 17(3):887–910, 2008.
  54. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Harper Collins, 2012.
  55. Rocco J. Gennaro. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology, volume 56 of Advances in Consciousness Research. John Benjamins Publishing, 2004.
  56. David Gil. Early human language was isolating-monocategorial-associational. In Angelo Cangelosi, Andrew D. M. Smith, and Kenny Smith, editors, The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference (EVOLANG6), pages 91–98, World Scientific, Rome, Italy, March 2006.
  57. Peter Godfrey-Smith. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
  58. Panpsychism. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, winter 2017 edition.
  59. Scratching beneath the surface: Intentionality in great ape signal production. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375(1789), 2020.
  60. Michael S. A. Graziano. Consciousness and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  61. Michael S. A. Graziano. Speculations on the evolution of awareness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(6):1300–1304, 2014.
  62. Michael S. A. Graziano. Attributing awareness to others: The attention schema theory and its relationship to behavioural prediction. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26(3-4):17–37, 2019.
  63. Toward a standard model of consciousness: Reconciling the attention schema, global workspace, higher-order thought, and illusionist theories. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 37(3–4):155–172, 2020.
  64. Richard L. Gregory. Perceptions as hypotheses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 290(1038):181–197, 1980.
  65. Mechanisms of synesthesia: Cognitive and physiological constraints. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(1):36–41, 2001.
  66. Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage, 2013. Paperback edition.
  67. Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1):39–78, 2014.
  68. Jakob Hohwy. The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  69. Predictive processing as a systematic basis for identifying the neural correlates of consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(II), 2020.
  70. Owen Holland, editor. Machine Consciousness. Imprint Academic, 2003.
  71. Owen Holland. Forget the bat. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 7(1):83–93, 2020.
  72. Robots with internal models: A route to machine consciousness? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(4-5):77–109, 2003.
  73. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. Three volumes, originally published by John Noon, 1739–40.
  74. Nicholas Humphrey. Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
  75. Nicholas Humphrey. Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2022.
  76. Ray Jackendoff. Consciousness and The Computational Mind. The MIT Press, 1987.
  77. William James. The Principles of Psychology. Holt, New York, 1890.
  78. Inferring and conveying intentionality: Beyond numerical rewards to logical intentions. In Antonio Chella et al., editors, Towards Conscious AI Systems Symposium (TOCAIS): AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Stanford, CA, March 2019. Also available as arXiv:2207.05058.
  79. Model-centered assurance for autonomous systems. In António Casimiro et al., editors, Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (SAFECOMP 2020), Volume 12234 of Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 228--243, Springer, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2020.
  80. Weight as an embodiment of importance. Psychological Science, 20(9):1169--1174, 2009.
  81. Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
  82. Generalization in anti-causal learning. arXiv:1812.00524, 2018.
  83. Robert Kirk. Zombies. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, spring 2019 edition.
  84. Attention and consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(1):16--22, 2007.
  85. Kurt Konolige et al. Centibots: Very large scale distributed robotic teams. In M.H. Ang and O. Khatib, editors, Experimental Robotics IX: The 9th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), number 21 in Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, pages 131--140, Singapore, 2006.
  86. Hermann Kopetz et al. Emergence in Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems. In Andrea Bondavalli, Sara Bouchenak, and Hermann Kopetz, editors, Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems, volume 10099 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 73--96. Springer-Verlag, 2016.
  87. George Lakoff. Mapping the brain’s metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8:958, 2014.
  88. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago press, 2008. First published 1980.
  89. Victor A.F. Lamme. Why visual attention and awareness are different. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(1):12--18, 2003.
  90. Hakwan Lau. In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Oxford University Press, 2022.
  91. Benjamin Libet. Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4):529--539, 1985.
  92. John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edw. Mory, 1689.
  93. The intermediate scope of consciousness in the predictive mind. Erkenntnis, 87(2):891--912, 2022.
  94. An anthropomimetic robot with imagination: One step closer to machine consciousness? In Nokia Workshop on Machine Consciousness, pages 34--35, 2008.
  95. Controlling an anthropomimetic robot: A preliminary investigation. In European Conference on Artificial Life. pages 736--745, Springer, 2007.
  96. David Marr. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982.
  97. Massimo Marraffa. Theory of Mind. In James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, editors, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Unknown date. https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/.
  98. Jennifer Mather. The case for octopus consciousness: Unity. NeuroSci, 2(4):405--415, 2021. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
  99. Cephalopod complex cognition. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 16:131--137, 2017.
  100. Robin McKie. Humans hunted for meat 2 million years ago. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/sep/23/human-hunting-evolution-2million-years, 22 September 2012.
  101. Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 34(2):57--111, 2011. See also the commentary on page 74 by Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and C. Nathan DeWall: ‘‘Arguing, Reasoning, and the Interpersonal (Cultural) Functions of Human Consciousness’’.
  102. Thomas Metzinger. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press, 2004.
  103. Thomas Metzinger. Self models. Scholarpedia, 2(10):4174, 2007.
  104. Steven Mithen. The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion. Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 1996.
  105. Sharing experiences in infancy: From primary intersubjectivity to shared intentionality. Frontiers in Psychology, 12:667--679, 2021.
  106. Thomas Nagel. What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4):435--450, October 1974.
  107. Tihamér N. Nemes. Cybernetic Machines. Gordon and Breach, New York, 1970. English translation from Hungarian, originally published 1962.
  108. H. Penny Nii. The blackboard model of problem solving and the evolution of blackboard architectures. AI Magazine, 7(2):38--53, 1986.
  109. Chasing the rainbow: The non-conscious nature of being. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1924, 2017.
  110. Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377(1843), 2022.
  111. Long Ouyang et al. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Volume 35, pages 27730--27744, 2022. Also available as arXiv:2203.02155.
  112. Steven Pinker. How the Mind Works. Penguin UK, 2003.
  113. Inner speech for a self-conscious robot. In Antonio Chella et al., editors, Towards Conscious AI Systems Symposium (TOCAIS): AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Stanford, CA, March 2019.
  114. Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge, 2014. First published in German 1934, English 1959.
  115. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4):515--526, 1978.
  116. Jesse Prinz. The Intermediate Level Theory of Consciousness. In Max Vellmans and Susan Schneider, editors, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, chapter 19. Wiley, second edition, 2017.
  117. Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture. In Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh, editors, Readings in Agents, pages 317--328. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1997.
  118. Rajesh P. N. Rao and Dana H. Ballard. Predictive coding in the visual cortex: A functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects. Nature Neuroscience, 2(1):79--87, 1999.
  119. James A. Reggia. The rise of machine consciousness: Studying consciousness with computational models. Neural Networks, 44:112--131, 2013.
  120. Michael Rescoria. The Language of Thought Hypothesis. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, summer 2019 edition.
  121. David Robson. What is consciousness like for other animals and when did it evolve? New Scientist, July 7, 2021.
  122. David M. Rosenthal. Varieties of Higher-Order Theory. In Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology [55], volume 56 of Advances in Consciousness Research, pages 17--44.
  123. David M. Rosenthal. Consciousness and Mind. Oxford University Press, 2005.
  124. Technology and consciousness. Technical report, Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, September 2018. Minor update available as arXiv:2209.03956.
  125. You can’t always get what you want: Predictive processing and consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 2, 2021.
  126. Britta Schünemann et al. Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action. Scientific Reports, 11, 2021.
  127. Consciousness explained or described? Neuroscience of Consciousness, 1:1--9, 2022.
  128. John R. Searle. Collective Intentions and Actions. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. E. Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication, pages 401--416. MIT Press, 1990.
  129. John R. Searle. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2010.
  130. Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a language model be conscious? arXiv:2211.11483, November 2022.
  131. Aarohi Shrivastava et al. Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. arXiv:2206.04615, June 2022.
  132. Conceptual alignment: How brains achieve mutual understanding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(3):180--191, 2016.
  133. Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
  134. How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure, and abstraction. Science, 331(6022):1279--1285, 2011.
  135. Michael Tomasello. The cultural origins of human cognition. Harvard University Press, 2009.
  136. Michael Tomasello. Origins of human communication. MIT Press, 2010.
  137. Michael Tomasello. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Harvard University Press, 2014.
  138. Shared intentionality. Developmental Science, 10(1):121--125, 2007.
  139. Integrated information theory: From consciousness to its physical substrate. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(7):450--461, 2016.

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Ai Sparkles Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Summarize Now