Sat.28.AUG.2010 -- First-Person
Consciousness
The declaration today of a "prsn" (person) variable in the
MindForth robot AI has a bearing not only on the proper
use of English verb forms in the first, second and third
person, but also on self-awareness and artificial consciousness. There is no consciousness module in
MindForth, because consciousness emerges not from a
single location but rather from the overall functionality
of the mind qua mind. Since the new "prsn" variable
will help the robot Mind to think about itself and talk
about itself in the first person singular, the person
variable will reinforce the very concept of the robot self
as the ego of a conscious mind. As the AI Mind speaks
confidently and grammatically about itself during
interaction with other persons -- human peers or robot
peers -- the evolution of AI reaches the all-important
milestone of self-referential thought.
MindForth did not previously have a "prsn" variable
because initially all utterances of the proof-of-concept
AI were in the third person plural by default. When the
goal was to demonstrate
thinking and not yet to trigger a Singularity, the simplest way to deal with
grammatical person was not to worry about it at all. As
the AI Mind has advanced in complexity and in
functionality, bugs and glitches began to appear which
could be resolved only by taking person into
consideration. The issue was forestalled while special
coding for be-verbs dealt with first-person forms
like "am" and with be-verbs required for use with
English pronouns, but now the general coding of
general verb-usage requires the adoption of a person
variable to make things work. The variable shall be "prsn"
for two reasons, brevity and clarity. The chosen name of
the variable has clarity because it refers not to a
general concept of "person" as perhaps a legal entity or
as perhaps a dramatic character, but rather to the
specific idea of first person, second person and third
person. The "prsn" variable will hold values of "1", "2"
or "3" accordingly, and may hold a zero ("0") value for
use with infinitive forms such as "to be".