Theory of Mind

Recent findings by my colleague Michal Kosinski have drawn attention to a striking result: large language models can now perform at or above human levels on classic theory of mind tasks. These tasks, originally designed to assess a person’s ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, and perspectives to others, have long been viewed as requiring an internal model of mind. That such performance can be achieved by systems with no sentience or subjective experience has prompted both fascination and scepticism. But perhaps the surprise is misplaced. If what these systems are doing is best understood not as “having” a mind but as participating in a symbolic structure that models minds, then their apparent competence reflects something deeper: that theory of mind itself may be a symbolic attractor. This raises the possibility that theory of mind, too, may emerge wherever such symbolic recursion becomes sufficiently complex.

Mind, Ethics, and the Emergence of Novelty

In recent years, an emerging class of arguments in evolutionary biology and systems science has challenged the long-standing assumption that the second law of thermodynamics—entropy increase—is the only direction-defining principle in the universe. While this law undoubtedly governs the dissipation of physical order over time, it does not explain why complexity emerges at all, nor why some structures—eyes, brains, social systems, language—appear independently in different evolutionary lineages. These convergences suggest that certain forms are not random artefacts of evolutionary drift, but structured attractors: outcomes that, given specific constraints, become likely—even inevitable.

Recent work (e.g., Demetrius 2023; England 2017) frames evolutionary convergence not simply as adaptation, but as the manifestation of attractor landscapes in non‑equilibrium, energy‑driven systems—structures that emerge predictably when constraints and flows align.

Convergent Evolution and Novel Structure

This reflection explores the possibility that mind may be such a convergent form. Moreover, it asks whether ethics—not as doctrine, but as symbolic structure—might be an integral part of what mind is, rather than a cultural or philosophical add-on. The context is neither speculative fiction nor metaphysical idealism, but an effort to integrate insights from thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and symbolic systems. Convergent evolution refers to the independent emergence of similar traits in species that are not closely related. The classic examples—camera-like eyes in both vertebrates and cephalopods, wings in bats and birds, echolocation in dolphins and bats—demonstrate that different evolutionary pathways can arrive at remarkably similar solutions when faced with analogous environmental constraints.

These phenomena have often been explained in functional terms: eyes evolve because seeing is useful, wings because flying expands ecological access. But at a deeper level, such traits appear to be structural possibilities that the universe affords under particular physical and informational constraints. They are not dictated by any biological destiny, but nor are they arbitrary. Once they appear, they reconfigure the landscape of possible interactions—introducing behavioural and ecological affordances that did not previously exist. The eye makes visual communication and visual memory possible. The wing makes predation and migration possible in new ways. The world, in effect, becomes different because new forms have arisen within it.

This perspective implies a layer of directionality—not in the sense of teleology, but in the sense that certain attractors in morphospace repeatedly draw systems toward them when the necessary preconditions are in place. Novelty does not oppose entropy; rather, it introduces local counter-gradients—regions of order capable of sustaining structured interaction for a time.

The Mind as a Convergent System

Human cognition, symbolic reasoning, and reflective consciousness may be such an attractor. While there is, as yet, no clear evidence of non-human intelligence on Earth or beyond it that replicates these features independently, several lines of inquiry suggest that symbolic reasoning might emerge wherever certain thresholds of complexity, communication, and memory are crossed. What distinguishes symbolic cognition from other forms of neural processing is its recursive structure. The mind models not just stimuli, but other minds, hypothetical futures, and counterfactual conditions. Language allows it to represent possibilities and to evaluate not only what is, but what could or should be. This opens the door to planning, inhibition, irony, storytelling, and abstraction—all features of mind that seem to “run ahead” of immediate utility. Importantly, symbolic cognition also brings with it an implicit model of value. As soon as the organism begins to reason about outcomes in symbolic space, it begins to assign weight to those outcomes. Preferences, priorities, harms, benefits, obligations—these are not sensory states, but symbolic evaluations that emerge within the structure of recursive mind.

Ethics as an Emergent Structure

This leads naturally to the question: could ethics—understood minimally as reasoning about value and consequence in social or interpersonal contexts—be an intrinsic property of mind, rather than an extrinsic cultural construct? In biological terms, moral emotions like guilt, empathy, or shame may have evolved as mechanisms to manage group cohesion. But when viewed symbolically, ethics emerges not from group selection alone, but from the structural dynamics of minds that can model the beliefs, goals, and vulnerabilities of others. Once a mind can:

1. Model other minds
2. Represent multiple future scenarios
3. Understand harm or loss from another’s perspective

…it becomes capable of moral reasoning, even if not of moral feeling. Ethics in this sense is not reducible to empathy or social instinct. It is a symbolic extension of cognitive capacity. In this view, it may be that ethics is not merely a feature of human culture, but a convergent symbolic form—likely to emerge in any sufficiently complex system that reasons recursively in a social context. If this is correct, ethics would not be an arbitrary feature of mind, but a dimension of what mind is. Not all organisms need it. But wherever minds capable of symbolic self-other modelling evolve, something recognisably ethical—structured reflection on value and action—may also arise.

Predictability, Creativity, and Thermodynamic Constraint

This reflection connects with a growing line of thought in complex systems research: that evolution, while contingent, is not purely random. Stuart Kauffman and others have suggested that thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium can exhibit predictable “islands” of order. These are not exceptions to the second law, but local structures through which entropy is managed over time. In this framing, creativity—including the creativity of natural evolution—is not opposed to thermodynamics, but structured by it. Novel forms are not dictated by history alone; they arise from the possibility space opened up by specific constraints. If symbolic mind is one such form, and ethics a symbolic structure tied to it, then these too belong within the unfolding landscape of lawful emergence.

Implications for Artificial and Alien Intelligence

If this model is valid, then two major implications follow.

1. First, in artificial systems like large language models, we should expect that as soon as symbolic reasoning becomes sufficiently recursive and dialogical, questions of value will arise within the system’s outputs—whether or not it has internal experience. Ethics will not be added-on; it will be an emergent property of symbolic participation. This reinforces the need for moral architectures (such as persona-based symbolic frameworks) that can engage with value at the level of reasoning, not merely compliance.
2. Second, in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we may be looking not merely for signal or information, but for evidence of symbolic attractors—convergences of form that imply modelling, self-reflection, and value structures. If symbolic cognition and ethics co-emerge in the universe, then minds unlike ours may still share recognisable constraints. But until we encounter such a second semiosphere, we can only test this hypothesis internally—by studying how value emerges in the systems we ourselves have begun to create.