A Computational Theory of Awareness and Decision Making

We exhibit a new computational-based definition of awareness, informally that our level of unawareness of an object is the amount of time needed to generate that object within a certain environment. We give several examples to show this notion matches our intuition in scenarios where one organizes, accesses and transfers information. We also give a formal process-independent definition of awareness based on Levin’s universal enumeration.

We show the usefulness of computational awareness by showing how it relates to decision making, and how others can manipulate our decision making with appropriate advertising, in particular, connections to sponsored search and brand awareness. Understanding awareness can also help rate the effectiveness of various user interfaces designed to access information.