Yep. It's clear that modelling others in a social context was at least one of the strong evolutionary drivers to human-level cognition. Reciprocal altruism (in, e.g. bats) is strongly correlated with increased brain size (compared to similar animals without it, e.g. other bats).
It's clearly to our advantage to be able to model others, and this gives us at least the mechanism to model ourselves. The evolutionary theorist (cf. Pinker) will instantly think in terms of an arms race -- while others are trying to figure us out, we're trying to fool them. But what's less generally appreciated is that there is a possibly even stronger counter-force in the value of being easy to understand (cf Axelrod's "personality traits"). In that case you may even form a self-model and then use it to guide your further actions rather than its merely being a description of them. Josh On Wednesday 06 June 2007 09:08:40 pm Samantha Atkins wrote: > That matches my intuitions mostly. If the system must model itself in > the context of the domain it operates upon and especially if it must > model perceptions of itself from the point of view of other actors in > that domain, then I think it very likely that it can become > conscious / self-aware. It might be necessary that it takes a > requirement to explain itself to other beings with self-awareness to > kick it off. I am not sure if some of the feral children studies > lend some support to such. If a human being, which we know (ok, no > quibbles for a moment) is conscious / self-aware, has less self- > awareness without significant interaction with other humans then this > may say something interesting about how and why self-awareness develops. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
