To make accurate inferences in an interactive setting, an agent must not confuse passive observation of events with having intervened to cause those events. The do operator formalises interventions so that we may reason about their effect. Yet there exist pareto optimal mathematical formalisms of general intelligence in an interactive setting which, presupposing no explicit representation of intervention, make maximally accurate inferences. We examine one such formalism. We show that in the absence of an operator, an intervention can still be represented by a variable. Furthermore, the need to explicitly represent interventions in advance arises only because we presuppose abstractions. The aforementioned formalism avoids this and so, initial conditions permitting, representations of relevant causal interventions will emerge through induction. These emergent abstractions function as representations of one`s self and of any other object, inasmuch as the interventions of those objects impact the satisfaction of goals. We argue (with reference to theory of mind) that this explains how one might reason about one's own identity and intent, those of others, of one`s own as perceived by others and so on. In a narrow sense this describes what it is to be aware, and is a mechanistic explanation of aspects of consciousness.

翻译：在交互环境中做出准确推断时，智能体必须避免将被动观察事件与主动干预事件相混淆。do算子形式化了干预行为，使我们能够推理其效果。然而，存在一种交互环境中通用智能的帕累托最优数学形式体系，它无需预设干预的显式表征，便能做出最大准确度的推断。本文考察了这样一种形式体系。研究表明，在缺乏算子的情况下，干预仍可通过变量来表征。进一步地，显式预先表征干预的需求之所以存在，仅仅是因为我们预设了抽象概念。前述形式体系避免了这一预设，因此在初始条件允许的情况下，相关因果干预的表征将通过归纳过程涌现。这些涌现的抽象概念，就其影响目标满足程度的对象干预而言，既可作为自身表征，也可作为其他任何对象的表征。我们（参照心智理论）论证，这解释了人们如何推理自身身份与意图、他人身份与意图、以及他人眼中自我身份与意图等问题。从狭义上说，这描述了意识的本质，并为意识的某些方面提供了机械论解释。