Abstract

This thesis describes EM-ONE, an architecture for commonsense thinking capable of reflective reasoning about situations involving physical, social, and mental dimensions. EM-ONE uses as its knowledge base a library of commonsense narratives, each describing the physical, social, and mental activity that occurs during an interaction between several actors. EM-ONE reasons with these narratives by applying "mental critics, " procedures that debug problems that exist in the outside world or within EM-ONE itself. Mental critics draw upon commonsense narratives to suggest courses of action, methods for deliberating about the circumstances and consequences of those actions, and—when things go wrong—ways to reflect upon and debug the activity of previously invoked mental critics. Mental critics are arranged into six layers, the reactive, deliberative, reflective, self-reflective, self-conscious, and self-ideals layers. The selection of mental critics within these six layers is itself guided by a separate collection

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