The preceding chapters presented the beginnings of a mathematical and mechanical theory of mind.

We began by examining the curious divorce between mechanical understandings of mind and nature that occurred when natural philosophy developed mathematical techniques useful in characterizing physical mechanics but inapplicable to mental mechanics. The mathematical study of mental materials developed separately, but with the key mathematical theories of logical and economic rationality lacking any connection to mechanics. The mechanical reconciliation of mind and nature began to take shape only when the development of artificial computers enabled construction of artificial minds precise and concrete enough to relate to a new rational mechanics broad enough to encompass mental as well as physical materials. The reconciliation promises not only to open traditional philosophical questions to new forms of technical analysis, but also to provide a new formal vocabulary for describing agents of limited rationality and for engineering computational and social systems based on such agents.

We then examined two sides of the reconciliation of physical and mental mechanics. On the physical side, we recast the axioms of modern rational mechanics so as to cover discrete mechanical systems and their hybrids with physical mechanical systems.