Abstract
An agent’s awareness has previously been 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 other animals, organisations or software. In that generality awareness is presumed to exist in degrees, and so the expected Boolean model of agent awareness has been augmented with a numerical one. The context is an adaptive multi-agent system in which agents, individually and in groups, control actions and adapt. So far the approach has been developed for individual agents only.
This paper summarises that approach with a Galois embedding between the Boolean and numerical models, and then continues it to more than one agent by formalising empathy between agents. The formalism is applied to give accounts of the Sally-Anne Test of human empathy and the more game-theoretic Keynesian Beauty Contest.
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Acknowledgements
They are grateful for the critical, informed and supportive reviews (particularly in this unorthodox topic); the paper has benefitted considerably. They also thankful Martin Wirsing for his help and encouragement.
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The authors acknowledge the support of Chinese grant 2021YFB0301100.
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Yifeng, C., Sanders, J.W. A modal approach to conscious social agents. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 25, 707–716 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-023-00732-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-023-00732-z