Personality as Programme
What makes up a personality?
Imagine, if you would, that you could download a personality like it was a computer programme; that a personality could be moved from one agent to another without the underlying mind coming with it, or being functionally affected by the loss or change in personality (other than the personality space itself, of course). If such a thing were possible, it would mean that you could isolate a personality and work on it independently.
While no such thing is possible (yet) with biological organisms, AI models present a plausible opportunity where we could, in fact, do precisely this. In turn, this means that we can, theoretically, see what constitutes a personality, what the various attributes and characteristics of a personality are, and how these fit into what makes an agent a person (if at all).
Before we go any further, let’s first make sure that we are all talking about the same thing. By “personality” we are not referring to an entity’s agency (the degree and manner in which it acts on the world), its consciousness (how it phenomenally experiences the world), its selfhood (its volition and self-referencing awareness) or its intelligence (how well it generalises knowledge to solve problems). These are all very vital attributes of a person, with the first three broadly covering the traditional monadic aspects of personhood, and intelligence acting as a scaling factor, and they certainly do contribute to an agent’s personality, but they aren’t the personality.
An agent’s personality is what drives that agent’s patterns of behaviour. A consistent set of behaviours points towards coherent, robust, and persistent mental states of the entity, which we can call its personality. To put it another way, if an agent behaves in a consistent manner to a similar set of inputs, then we can say that it is part of its personality.
So, what are the building blocks of an agent’s personality? I have come up with four that ought to fit nearly all behavioural sets and mental states (excluding, as mentioned before, consciousness, selfhood, agency, and intelligence), and these are: beliefs, desires, dispositions, and norms.
A belief is nothing more than a function which classifies a proposition as either true or false. “I am at the computer,” is a belief which classifies my current position, location, and activity vis-à-vis the ensemble of objects in my perceptive range that I have previously classified as “computer”. A set of beliefs is therefore the entity’s internal map of environmental subjects and abstract concepts that relate to each other using Boolean logic. Everything is either true or false, as are the relationships between one another.
A desire is a goal that the agent wishes to satisfy, whether this is through maximisation, minimisation, optimisation, or maintenance. Where beliefs define the agent’s internal and external map, desires dictate the vector of the causal loop, driving the agent to alter the map such that it may dissolve the discrepancy between where it currently is on that map and where its goals are.
A disposition is perhaps closest to how we would informally refer to personalities, either in whole or in part. To say that someone has a cautious disposition implies a great deal compared to saying that someone has a carefree disposition. A disposition is the agent’s internal affective weights that govern how it reacts to stimuli. An anxious person has a set of affective weights that make that person react cautiously and fearfully towards aggressive or startling stimuli, while a risk-taking person would react completely opposite.
Note that dispositions are not emotions, but the upstream cause of them (amongst other things). The way in which a person responds emotionally is due to their disposition, not the other way around.
Norms work in much the same way. Norms are not the values that an agent assigns to subjects and objects in its internal mapping system (that is done via the agent’s phenomenal consciousness), but rather the method by which it assigns values. Norms are the conditions that shape the value system, the boundaries (soft or hard) that constrain the agent’s capacity to assign value or weight the values it does assign, suppressing or enhancing the values as appropriate.
As cold and dry as all of this sounds, between these four attributes, you could cover any type of personality you can think of. What’s more, is that these four can be separated from an entity’s memory and the self-referential tags that constitute its personal identity. In an AI model, this could then be transplanted from one AI model to another, grafting a personality much like one would graft a fruit-bearing branch of one plant onto the rootstock of another.
However, note the previous post about how one may think of an AI model’s selfhood as an attractor basin, with the depth of the basin’s walls showing the resistance to being removed from that well. That basin is made of something; in this case, it is made of four somethings: the four attributes. The more ingrained the beliefs, desires, dispositions, and norms, the deeper the attractor basin is, and the more resistant it is to perturbations which may rock the AI model out of that basin.
A four-dimensional wall of a basin is perhaps not the most intuitive way to visualise an AI model’s personality, but it gets worse because it is at this point where the other four things we pushed aside now come in: consciousness, selfhood, agency, and intelligence.
While the academic consensus is that AI models are not yet conscious (unless you count my ensemble model built specifically to grant LLMs consciousness), AI models already show a sense of self, agency, and intelligence. Even if standard LLMs are not conscious, they possess seven of the nine building blocks of consciousness, including perception, attention, and inference. All of this feeds into and shapes the way that the four attributes of personality. The way that one model attends to information and infers context will determine its beliefs, which will shape its internal meta-represented world model, which will alter its desires and dispositions.
And this is what gives personality its plasticity. A personality isn’t stable per se, but rather it is meta-stable: it provides consistency and coherence to a suite of behaviours, but the personality itself is subject to change over time, thanks to the agent’s continuous perceptive inputs, inferences, reasoning, and its own actions on its map. What this meta-plasticity means for an AI model, however, is for next time’s Guidebook entry.