I've been reading recently about the Language of Thought Hypothesis and the idea that conscious thought may be a production system. That is, it seems to work l

I've been reading recently about the Language of Thought Hypothesis and the idea that conscious thought may be a production system. That is, it seems to work like a formal language or rule-based logic where a "sentence" (in the symbolic sense) may be extended or transformed by "rules" to produce new "productions" in theoretically infinite length and variety even if the actual performance thereof is bounded by limits of time and memory. In contrast it seems almost all game NPC AI's are state-machine based. One could fit this into the framework described above by calling it a degenerate form of production system, where rules can be applied to transform a sentence (or symbol) representing one state into that representing another state, but none of the states are combinatoric and the rules just interact in a directed graph. I'd like to see a game where, instead of just states in a state-machine, the NPC's could generate thoughts like a production system. Even if it wasn't connected up to complex action or a planner, it would be interesting if the NPC's could have inner lives based on a chain of thinking, like, "Mary loves Joe. Joe loves his dog. Joe's dog eats hot dogs. I wonder from where Joe buys the hot dogs for his dog." Etc. etc. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ArguProdThou https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ArguPro...