> In message <002a01beb91d$9de9fbe0$6f243fce@rb4010>, Richard Brodie
> <richard@brodietech.com> writes
> >A conscious being
> >will, before making a decision, imagine what it would be like to do it
and
> >feed the results of that thought experiment back into the decision.
>
> Surely any information-processing system that was capable of modelling
> would do this, without having to be conscious
Sounds an awful lot like model based reasoning which has had applications in AI since (at least) Winograd's SHRDLU project in 1970: <http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs147/examples/shrdlu/>. The aforementioned web page focuses on the natural language aspect of the system. I reverse engineered SHRDLU as part of an AI course in grad studies. It develops plans for moving blocks around by applying a theorem prover to a formal representation of its world, so in quite a literal sense it fits Richard's definition (though not at all in the same league as the way humans do similar things).
David