The properties of mental experience evince its communicative function

The biological function of mental experience has remained enigmatic. Since conscious experiences are distinguished by their availability for verbal report, this work explores the hypothesis that mental experience functions in service of communication. By examining a system of communicating agents, I argue that agents with complex behavior and conflicting payoffs can benefit by influencing how they are perceived by others, and that this influence is achieved by communicating about the computational system controlling their behavior. It is impractical for biological or artificial computational systems to provide mechanistic models of themselves; instead, they can construct a mind: a simplifying — and sometimes misleading — model that accounts for behavior in terms of intentions, desires, goals, and emotions. Such a mind model can plausibly be implemented with typical neural mechanisms for computation and learning, and is remarkably consistent with human mental experience: a sparse and simplified account that prioritizes socially relevant information and distorts toward self-interest. The content of mental experience is proposed to be that which may be worth communicating about, and voluntary behaviors to be those whose motivations are worth communicating about. The social utility, feasibility of implementation, and consistency with mental experience together provide strong support for the hypothesis that the mind functions to communicate internal state.