To make accurate inferences in an interactive setting, an agent must not confuse passive observation of events with having participated in causing those events. The do operator formalises interventions so that we may reason about their effect. Yet there exist at least two 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，智能体必须区分被动观察事件与主动参与导致事件发生。do算子形式化了干预操作，使我们可以推理其效果。然而，存在至少两种帕累托最优的通用智能数学模型，它们无需预设干预的显式表示，就能在交互环境中做出最大准确度的推断。我们考察了其中一种形式体系，并证明：在缺乏do算子的情况下，干预仍可通过变量表示；且预先显式表示干预的需求仅源于我们预设了抽象概念。上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突现出来。这些突现的抽象表征既可作为自我表征，也可作为任何其他对象的表征——只要这些对象的干预行为对其目标满足程度产生影响。我们（借助心智理论）论证：这解释了主体如何推理自身身份与意图、他人身份与意图，以及他人如何感知自身身份与意图等问题。从狭义上讲，这描述了何为"觉察"，并为意识的某些方面提供了机制性解释。