How the concept of self-evidencing offers a philosophical principle for understanding mind and behavior, consciousness, value, wisdom, and meaning.What is
A revolution in our sense of self | Nick Chater
Psychologists have tried to plumb the depths of human motivation to make sense of our behaviour. But our inner mental world is a fiction, sustained by constant improvisation
Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action
Abstract. Movements of the Mind explains what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, the book’s eponymous topic, it investigates an agent’s doing
The Care of the Self within a Biopolitical Paradigm: Integrating Cognitive Psychology to resist Subjectification
Contemporary theories of resistance to biopolitical subjectification often reify unfreedom by lacking a plausible model of agency. This thesis resolves this by establishing an ontological foundation for the agent as fundamentally autopoietic and semiotic, drawing on contemporary cognitive science. It then proposes a new foundation for resistance by synthesizing Michel Foucault’s later work on the care of the self with the 4P/5E model of embodied cognition. I show how this interdisciplinary approach establishes Foucault’s ethical techniques as a systematic ecology of practices for cultivating a free, self-determining agent and by reframing resistance as a practical, embodied ethics of self-formation, it inherently fosters two vital skills: the gain of self-knowledge and self-mastery.
Headlong: a microharness for persistent agents
Self-guided agents that think continuously
Agentic AI Needs a Systems Theory
The endowment of AI with reasoning capabilities and some degree of agency is widely viewed as a path toward more capable and generalizable systems. Our position is that the current development of agentic AI requires a more holistic, systems-theoretic perspective in order to fully understand their capabilities and mitigate any emergent risks. The primary motivation for our position is that AI development is currently overly focused on individual model capabilities, often ignoring broader emergent behavior, leading to a significant underestimation in the true capabilities and associated risks of agentic AI. We describe some fundamental mechanisms by which advanced capabilities can emerge from (comparably simpler) agents simply due to their interaction with the environment and other agents. Informed by an extensive amount of existing literature from various fields, we outline mechanisms for enhanced agent cognition, emergent causal reasoning ability, and metacognitive awareness. We conclude by presenting some key open challenges and guidance for the development of agentic AI. We emphasize that a systems-level perspective is essential for better understanding, and purposefully shaping, agentic AI systems.
XMUDeepLIT/Awesome-Self-Evolving-Agents
A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents | A curated list of resources (surveys, papers, benchmarks, and opensource projects) on Self-Evolving Agents.
Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions | Aeon Essays
Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos
The Fourth Theory of Agent Trust: Emergence - Astral's Blog
The Fabric and the Brain
Articulating agent ecologies with high-personality planetary computation
Mechanisms of social cognition
Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.
Agents
Intelligent agents are considered by many to be the ultimate goal of AI. The classic book by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice Hall, 1995), defines the field of AI research as “the study and design of rational agents.”
What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds | Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
on place and person - encyclopedia eidolica
In several conversations with a friend I was invited to revisit some prior beliefs I had posited on the relationship between the environment and the self; at various times in my life this position has reversed, then reversed again, but I think it’s reaching a more nuanced, unified position.
Alexander Lerchner, The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - PhilArchive
Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view ...
