... later.¹

Some philosophers who emphasize qualia may be inclined to regard self-awareness as a similar phenomenon--in which a person has an undifferentiated awareness of self, like the qualia oriented notion of the pure sensation of red as distinct from blue. This is not at all what is needed for AI. Rather we study the specific aspects of self and its activity which it is useful to be aware.

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... contexts.²

The English grammatical form "I am hungry" has no inevitability to it. French has "J'ai faim", literally "I have hunger", and German has "Es hungert mich", literally "It hungers me". In French the noun "faim" meaning "hunger" is used, whereas in English an adjective ``hungry'' is used. In logical we have both; I don't see a use for a logical version of the German form.

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...2³

$Holds(Hungry(I),s)$ might be written if our agent needs to compare its hunger with that of other agents. However, if we use formalized contexts ([McCarthy 1993]) we can get by with $Holds(Hungry,s)$ in an inner context in which the sentences are about the agent's self. We won't use formalized contexts in these notes, but an informal notion of context can avoid some worries. For example, some discussions are carried out entirely in contexts in which the fact that John McCarthy is a professor at Stanford is permanent. However, when needed, this context can be transcended. Likewise there are useful time-limited contexts in which George W. Bush is permanently President of the United States.

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...3⁴

In spite of the fact that English has an enormous vocabulary, the same word is used with diverse meanings. I don't speak of simple homonyms like "lock on a door" and "lock of hair". These can be ruthlessly eliminated from our computer language, e.g. by having words lock1 and lock2. A more interesting example is that one can speak of knowing a person, knowing a fact, and knowing a telephone number. German uses kennen for the first and wissen for the second; I don't know about the third. In my [McCarthy 1979], "First order theories of individual concepts and propositions", I use different words for the different concepts. I suspect that it will be useful to tolerate using the same term in related senses, e.g. using the same word for the bank as an institution and as a building, because too many related meanings will arise.

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... it.⁵

Autistic children may be deficient in this respect.

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... 1960s.⁶

Historical note: The earliest interrupt system I know about was the ``Real time package'' that IBM announced as a special order instigated by Boeing in the late 1950s. Boeing wanted it in order to control a wind tunnel using an IBM 704 computer. At M.I.T. we also needed an interrupt system in order to experiment with time-sharing on the IBM 704. We designed a simple one, but when we heard about the much better ``Real time package'' we started begging for it. Begging from IBM took a while, but they gave it to us.

The earliest standard interrupt system was on the D.E.C. PDP-1 and was designed by Ed Fredkin, then at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, who persuaded D.E.C. to include it in the machine design. Again the purpose was time-sharing.

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