A calculus for robot inner speech and self-awareness

Abstract

The inner speech is the common mental experience the humans have when they dialogue with themselves. It is widely acknowledged that inner speech is related to awareness and self-awareness. The inner speech reproduces and expands in the mind social and physical sources of awareness. In this preliminary work, a calculus based on a first-order modal logic to automate inner speech is presented. It attempts to make the existing inner speech theories suitable for robot. By making robot able to talk to itself, it is possible to analyze the role of inner speech in robot awareness and self-awareness, opening new interesting research scenarios not yet investigated.