Function Alignment: A New Theory of Mind and Intelligence, Part I: Foundations
It proposes a foundational theory for understanding and building minds, potentially impacting cognitive science and AI, but it is not incremental as it presents a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling mind and intelligence by introducing function alignment, a novel theory that explains how meaning and analogy emerge from layered representations, resulting in a unified framework that bridges cognitive science, computational architecture, and psychological theory.
This paper introduces function alignment, a novel theory of mind and intelligence that is both intuitively compelling and structurally grounded. It explicitly models how meaning, interpretation, and analogy emerge from interactions among layered representations, forming a coherent framework capable not only of modeling minds but also of serving as a blueprint for building them. One of the key theoretical insights derived from function alignment is bounded interpretability, which provides a unified explanation for previously fragmented ideas in cognitive science, such as bounded rationality, symbol grounding, and analogy-making. Beyond modeling, the function alignment framework bridges disciplines often kept apart, linking computational architecture, psychological theory, and even contemplative traditions such as Zen. Rather than building on any philosophical systems, it offers a structural foundation upon which multiple ways of understanding the mind may be reconstructed.