Background to A Theory of Mind

A Theory of the Human Mind provides a unified description of how consciousness plays out in the human mind, and how an artificial simulation of it can be created from that theory. The Philosophical Description of Consciousness frames those conclusions in relation to the experience of being human. This article focuses on how those conclusions were reached.

In order to explain why consciousness is what it is, you will be taken on a journey through your own mind. This journey will attempt to peel away the layers of obscurity, and to drill down through uncertainty when there are things that we cannot directly measure.

A Mental Exercise

To begin, you will need a stimulating drink. So please take 5 minutes to make yourself a coffee or tea, or other drink of your choice. While you are doing that, please observe your thoughts. There are things to discuss upon your return.

Making Tea

The act of making tea involves many steps. Some of those steps can be done at different times, while others require a definite order. Some of those steps have some flexibility, while others must be carried out exactly. If you were to pour the coffee grounds into the cup, instead of the plunger, you will have a very grainy coffee. Or if you were to pour the made coffee, before getting a cup, you will have your drink all over the table and floor. You probably didn't notice many acts of conscious decision making happening during the process, and you most likely didn't notice each of the individual steps. You almost certainly did not notice any effort required to plan the stages, their order, and their timing.

Assuming you chose to make a drink that you are familiar with, you largely carried out the tasks in auto-pilot, because you already know each of the steps too well to require any conscious thought.

Trying Something New

That task was too easy. Time for something more challenging. You need to try something you don't already know how to do. Thankfully the internet is full of brain teasers. And they're perfect for the next exercise.

Please take the next 5 to 15 minutes to find a couple of brain teasers you have never done before, and try to solve them. While you are solving each brain teaser, pay careful attention to your thought process. In particular:

• In your thinking process, how do you decide to move from one step to the next?
• How do you know what the next thing to try is?
• When there are multiple things you could try, how do you decide which to try first?

(tbd: provide a list of good example brain teasers)

Here's the big thing that you will hopefully notice during that exercise:

• Some thoughts just appear.

Spontaneous Thoughts

This is the first glimpse into how the brain functions. In common language, we call this the sub-conscious. It's full of learned knowledge, mental skills, heuristics, mental short-cuts, and strategies for blind guessing. It's extremely adept at taking a problem, and throwing suggestions at it. Some of those suggestions will be correct solutions, while others will be completely unhelpful. As we develop and mature, the sub-conscious gets more and more accurate for our common everyday tasks.

In the terminology of Danial Kahneman this is System 1 or Fast Thinking.

We can do a lot with only System 1 thinking. In fact, we spend a lot of time doing only System 1 thinking. Keep that in mind, as we will come back to it shortly.

Neurons in Space

In software AI, Neural Networks are typically stored as data. That makes it easy to duplicate them, move them, and to apply them to some other inputs that came from a different source than where they were used previously. The physical neurons in a brain do not move. If you want to process a different piece of input data, using the same neural pathway as before, you need to move the input data to the neurons.

Likewise, our brains are full of many different individual regions of neural network that each focus on a particular task. If we want to think about something from our past, we cannot direct the appropriate neural network region to act against data directly in memory. Rather, that memory must be loaded into a specific location in the brain that acts as the capture point for that region of neural network. But, having a different capture point for each task-focused region would lead to very limited thought patterns.

It's more likely that there is a single region within the brain, that holds the data being actively worked on, enabling many regions of the brain to observe and act against that data at once. This is the purpose of working memory.

Task-Focused Processors

If much of the brain is divided into regions that focus on a particular task, and they act only on the data within working memory, then it seems likely that each individual task-focused region operates in a System 1 Thinking way.

Referring now to those task-focused regions attached to working memory as Processors, here's a model that they could operate on:

1. Some input is loaded into working memory
2. All attached processors have the potential for producing an output.
3. Some automated selection process is used to pick the best output. This is likely some sort of competition mechanism, such as picking the outcome with the strongest signal strength.
4. The selected output is loaded back into working memory as the new state, and the process repeats.

The description here seems remarkably like a generic computing engine, something akin to a Turing Machine.

There is more to the puzzle yet, but this is one of the more significant points here:

• the consciously aware part of our brain is a biological computing engine.

Awareness of Thought and the Error Prone Brain

In the exercises above, you observed the flow of thoughts while you carried out actions and solved a difficult problem. But why can you observe them at all?

tbd: consciousness is a sense.

tbd: error prone brain. (tbd: can move some of the detailed content from philosophical articles into here)

So the awareness of our own thoughts is a fundamentally necessary input to our thought process, in order to govern its activity. And the integration of working memory and processors now looks like this:

1. Some input is loaded into working memory
2. All attached processors have the potential for producing an output.
3. A learned selection process is used to pick the best output.
4. The selected output is loaded back into working memory as the new state, and the process repeats.
5. The short and long-term outcomes are monitored and critiqued over time, and controls are employed wherever necessary to adjust how the thought process is carried out.

Experiencing of Consciousness

One of the greatest unsolved problems of consciousness is why we experience it in the way that we do.

There are a few aspects to that:

1. Awareness of Thought as a first-class sense.
2. Mental Model of Mind
3. Awareness of Thought integrated
4. The thing that experiences

...tbd...

Scope of Awareness

One fascination outcome of the theory above is in how we are aware of some thinking processes, but not others....tbd...

tbd: size of working memory vs CF.

The odd selection of catchment area is likely an artifact of what CF is needed for : to manage errors.

Learning

Fitness functions - minimise surprise.