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Mental events, especially mental actions

Mental events change the situation just as do physical events.

Here is a list of some mental events, mostly described informally.

It should be obvious to the reader that we are far from having a comprehensive list of the effects of mental events. However, I hope it is also apparent that the effects of a great variety of mental events on the mental part of a situation can be formalized. Moreover, it should be clear that useful robots will need to observe mental events and reason with facts about their effects.

Most work in logical AI has involve theories in which it can be shown that a sequence of actions will achieve a goal. There are recent extensions to concurrent action, continuous action and strategies of action. All this work applies to mental actions as well.

Mostly outside this work is reasoning leading to the conclusion that a goal cannot be achieved. Similar reasoning is involved in showing that actions are safe in the sense that a certain catastrophe cannot occur. Deriving both kinds of conclusion involves inductively inferring quantified propositions, e.g. ``whatever I do the goal won't be achieved'' or ``whatever happens the catastrophe will be avoided.'' This is hard for today's automated reasoning techniques, but Reiter [Reiter, 1993] and his colleagues have made important progress.


next up previous contents
Next: Logical paradoxesGödel's theorems, Up: Formalized Self-Knowledge Previous: Mental Situation Calculus

John McCarthy
Mon Jul 15 13:06:22 PDT 2002