Start with a system that is only good for representing people having motivations (desired world states) and beliefs (local version of the world state) and things that they said about what they want/believe/heard. Everyone applies force on the world state in their desired direction by saying / doing things and this force is applied in accordance with the world state ultimately affecting what people believe about the world state. For anything in the world state, you can always ask "why" to go to a motivation that caused it and "how" to go from a motivation to a preceding path in the world state.
From this system of reasoning about other entities that are reasoning in similar ways, and where there is no absolute truth only belief, you can hack it into a system of general purpose reasoning by personification. You attribute a fictitious consciousness to whatever physical property who's motivations are coincident with whatever physical laws. "The particle wants to be in the ground state". "The Pythagorean tells us what you are trying to do is impossible". "Be nice to your car and it will be nice to you". From a situation where there's only beliefs and statements, we can define truth by inventing a fictitious entity who's belief is by definition always correct. Statements we make are a nested scope, {a world within a world}, and we are contained within the root scope of his statements. In other words if you organize information in a hierarchy, its useful to invent a root user even if its just a useful fiction. God, root, whats the diff?
From this system of reasoning about other entities that are reasoning in similar ways, and where there is no absolute truth only belief, you can hack it into a system of general purpose reasoning by personification. You attribute a fictitious consciousness to whatever physical property who's motivations are coincident with whatever physical laws. "The particle wants to be in the ground state". "The Pythagorean tells us what you are trying to do is impossible". "Be nice to your car and it will be nice to you". From a situation where there's only beliefs and statements, we can define truth by inventing a fictitious entity who's belief is by definition always correct. Statements we make are a nested scope, {a world within a world}, and we are contained within the root scope of his statements. In other words if you organize information in a hierarchy, its useful to invent a root user even if its just a useful fiction. God, root, whats the diff?