Toward a Unified Mind Theory: Reflexive Self-Modeling as a Criterion of Mind

The sciences of mind study memory, perception, inference, and learning without an agreed account of what makes a system a mind at all. The usual appeal to consciousness ties that question to the harder phenomenal one. This paper separates them and proposes a criterion at the level of running processes rather than mental states: a mind is an occurrent process capable of reflexive self-modeling, wherein the assessment and regulation of its own self-modeling are part of the very operation they condition. Separable monitoring supplies an output that the relevant operation consumes; constitutive self-modeling is among the activities that operation consists in. Only the latter meets the criterion. This is a difference in kind, not in degree, and the resulting organization is what the paper calls the fold. Nothing is faintly minded: a system either instantiates the fold or does not. The criterion specifies no necessary substrate, body, survival stake, or persistence beyond the running. It also individuates: one fold is one mind, and reciprocal constitutive closure excludes nested minds without excluding nested mechanisms. Whether a system instantiates the fold is open to third-person investigation. A further claim, that consciousness is the same process from its own standpoint, is presented separately as a wager on which the criterion does not depend.