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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA
From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Mental states of machines
Message-ID: <14725@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Dec-83 20:46:06 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.14725
Posted: Wed Dec 14 20:46:06 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Dec-83 01:04:55 EST
Lines: 24

The only reason I have to believe that a system encodes in its states
classifications of the states of other systems is that the systems we
are talking about are ARTIFICIAL, and therefore this is part of our
design. Of course, you are free to say that down at the bottom our
system is just a finite-state machine, but that's about as helpful as
making the same statement about the computer on which I am typing this
message when discussing how to change its time-sharing resource
allocation algorithm.

Besides this issue of convenience, it may well be the case that
certain predicates on the states of other or the same system are
simply not representable within the system. One does not even need to
go as far as incompleteness results in logic: in a system which has
means to represent a single transitive relation (say, the immediate
accessibility relation for a maze), no logical combination can
represent the transitive closure (accessibility relation) [example due
to Bob Moore]. Yet the transitive closure is causally connected to the
initial relation in the sense that any change in the latter will lead
to a change in the former. It may well be the case (SPECULATION
WARNING!) that some of the "mental state" predicates have this
character, that is, they cannot be represented as predicates over
lower-level notions such as states.

-- Fernando Pereira