Transitivity Principle

The "transitivity principle" [Rosenthal 1997] is part of Higher order theories of consciousness and [1] and expresses the idea that when being "conscious" about an object, the subject will also be conscious about the consciousness about the object, be conscious about the consciousness about the consciousness and so forth.

Can Scene Based Reasoning/TinyCog exhibit such a behavior? SBR implements Introspection of internal states by mapping internal states into scenes which in turn can become objects of the SBR system. This corresponds broadly to the "HOP" (Higher Order Perception) theory of consciousness that states that "consciousness" is achieved by "perceiving" the perception etc., effectively allowing to replace the word "consciousness" in the above definition by "perception".

The Attention Subsystem plays an important role in this philosophical discussion. In SBR, the higher-order perceptions will only "appear" to the SBR system if the Attention Subsystem focuses it's attention on it. This "availability on request" type of behavior would actually correspond more to the "Dispositionalist" variant of the "HOT" (Higher Order Thought) theory of consciousness.

The argument between HOT and HOP seems to hinge on the differences between "perception" and "thought", where "perception" is more associated with sensory objects and "thought" is more associated with some kind of logical representation (please Contact us if _you're_ a philosopher and get the difference). However, this difference does not seem to apply in the context of SBR, where a "thought" is represented using the Scene data-structure as a perception.

We believe that this discussion is only of marginal importance to TinyCog and it's practical applications.