Anomalies of Self - Description

Theoretical psychology, broadly conceived, is the study of all mind-like behavior wherever it may arise. In this sense, the subject matter of theoretical psychology includes artificial mental mechanisms as well as those mental mechanisms which have arisen naturally (or may yet so arise). Automaton theory is the abstract and precise study of all discrete deterministic devices and processes. In so far as mental mechanisms (natural or artificial) can be explained in discrete deterministic terms, automaton theory is a convenient and valuable source of precise concepts for a broadly conceived theoretical psychology. A putative important function of mental mechanisms is the control, guidance, and regulation of the activities of larger physical systems of which the mental meclhanisms are a part. For a mechanism to be a good guide, controller and regulator of a system, the mechanism must possess a good model of the system to be controlled, guided or regulated; for a system to be a good guide, controller and regulator of itself, it must have access to a good model of itself, l'hus, organisms and artificial systems alike must have access to information about such properties as their temperature and pressure tolerances, their size, strength, endurance, speed, reasoning abilities, etc. in order to survive, to move about safely, or to plan wisely. Presumably, the more complete and accurate the knowledge of itself which a system can make available to itself, the better it can perform, and the more successful it will be. In this paper, we explore some ways in which a discrete deterministic system can make available to itself information about itself. We concentrate on the problem of a system coming to possess logical descriptions of itself (e.g. in the sense of Putnam, 1960) of sufficient completeness and accuracy that it can simulate its own possible alternative future courses of action. In order to speak with some specificity, we model the self-description process in a particular Tufing machine format. We will begin by examining the strategy of -machine complete self-description enunciated by Lee (1963) and given a