Modes of Thought

AI researchers often referencing Alfred North Whitehead's book "Modes of Thought" in an attempt to explain thought, consciousness, and reasoning. Whitehead's writings suggests that thought has quality of being both conditional and discrete. These two qualities are coveted in AI programming. Whitehead starts by discussing the topics of "Interest and Importance". He covers the topics of interest and importance. Interest drives importance, as either exciters or inhibitors. One becomes interested in his environmental factors and this interest activates a conditional response. To the observer, he believes this process is called thinking, but is following a series of behavioral responses and conditioned beliefs. The outcome of these conditions can be represented by a graph of possible paths. Disbelief is the pruning of certain paths that are dependent on the environmental factors. Consciousness seems to be the awareness or intuition too believe in ones conclusions or disbelieve. Consciousness creatively adds or subtracts conditional states in a person belief tree. The interaction of these states generates discrete and predictable behavior and the observer concludes intelligence is emerging. In reality the system is a series of augmented finite state machines running their algorithms. Interest and importance are the primary reasons for effort after exact discrimination of the sense data. For example, the motion of cars approaching an intersection is the conditioned by signals. The driver watches signals to determine exist lanes, when to stop, the rate of speed, merging into adjacent lanes, and travel spacing. The traffic signals are the outcome of the traffic. Stop lights are added to busy intersection to manage the flow of traffic and reduce confusion on turn taking at the intersection, car pool lanes encourage conservation by consolidation, and large digital messages forewarn of pending changes in traffic flow or detours information. Importance generates interest.
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