Herein I argue for a mechanically sparse representation of the mind as a hypothetical “slot machine” that can help elucidate free agents’ interactions with their environments and notions of culpability in the ideal, supremely reasonable actor.

If we think of a (purely hypothetical) slot machine with many different levers representing stimuli, symbols on reels representing different actions and choices - much like a Turing machine represents ordered information via symbols printed on tape - and the computer inside the machine carrying out whatever operations are done once a certain stimulus is encountered, then we have a serviceable model for people acting according to incoming stimuli. To put it simply: a lever is pulled, the internal computer performs operations on the input, and an action or choice is produced.

While with a true slot machine it is random in the short term which symbols the reels stop on, there is a general pattern to those combinations that determine a “winning” combination. This could be similar to how there are changes in peoples’ experience that they react to predictably, but not deterministically. A “winning” combination, or predictable reaction to a stimulus, could manifest as a number of choices and actions.

Thus, I’m not saying there is a random number generator in the brain, but rather what can be thought of as a mechanism that can be represented statistically that is similar to the simple case of a random number generator with symbols on reels. Outwardly we see the possible choices or actions like symbols on a reel, but internally there is something biasing certain outcomes due to the nature of certain stimuli and the characteristics of the internal computer.

So, we have an abstract sort of slot machine with an arbitrarily large number of distinct levers representing stimuli, and an arbitrarily large number of different symbols on arbitrarily long reels determining which choices are made, which are themselves modulated by the internal computer.

The obvious evolution of the slot machine model is to make the computer in the slot machine an ideal computer that is biased towards doing what we think a reasonable person would do in the presence of a given stimulus, and thus we could have an ideal representation of what a reasonable person would do in otherwise ambiguous situations. Legally, this could be interesting.

There are a number of assumptions at work in my argument. One is that actions and choices, or a number of actions and choices, can be broken down into abstract chunks and rearranged to represent something greater than the sum of their parts. Another is that there we could figure out the workings of the ideal modulator as the internal computer via some sort of aggregate analysis of the actions, thoughts, and feelings of ideal, reasonable people, and program it in a coherent, human way.

Let me know what you guys think.