A Modal Approach to Consciousness of Agents

Abstract

An agent’s awareness is modelled as a modal operator in such a way that awareness can be iterated and consciousness formalised as awareness of awareness. Agents are not necessarily human and may a priori be animals, organisations or software, in which setting awareness is expected to exist in degrees and so is modelled with nonnegative reals rather than just Booleans. The formalism thus expresses the degree to which an agent exhibits awareness (and so consciousness). The context is an adaptive multi-agent system in which agents control actions, individually or in groups, and adapt ecorithmically (in the sense of Valiant) by adjusting behaviour in the short term and evolving in the very much longer term. Laws and inequalities are given and shown to be sound, but the intuition is that awareness ‘enables’ actions to form the agent’s next behavioural step whilst consciousness provides the agent with an opportunity to adapt that behaviour.