Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.12, 2019

 

Logical and Cognitive Issues of Self-Improvement Agents

(Abstract)

 

Ren Xiaoming and Li Xi

 

The establishment of self-improvement agents has offered a programmatic standard to the research of people’s self-awareness. With this formal method, it is possible to bridge the differences in machine consciousness in the academic world and break the predicament facing machine consciousness research. But it also has logical limitations. Enactivism lays the cognitive foundation for the proposal of self-improvement agents. The success of self-improvement agents provides a strong example of enactivism. Although the self-improvement agent has taken a big step towards the machine’s real self-awareness, one can only say that it has “functional consciousness.” The crux of the predicament of machine consciousness stems from the differences and biases between the tradition of analytic philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. The solution lies in: from opposition to compatibility, from mutual exclusion to complementarity, and then to a new realm of integration.