Selzer, Edgar (2026) When Does a Machine Become a Self-Conscious Agent? A Structural Threshold Model of Endogenous Reflective Agency (ERA). [Preprint]
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Abstract
When does a machine become a self-conscious agent—able to model itself as a cognitive subject whose past commits its present? Existing answers fall into two camps: behaviorist scaling theses, which equate benchmark performance with progress toward self-conscious machines, and phenomenal-consciousness theories, which inherit the difficulties of the hard problem. This paper advances a third option. The target is restricted to self-consciousness in two well-defined senses: higher-order self-modeling, in which a system represents itself as a cognitive subject, and diachronic self-constitution, in which a system maintains itself as a persisting subject whose history is normatively binding on its present. The paper remains agnostic about phenomenal consciousness. It then advances a threshold thesis formalized as Endogenous Reflective Agency (ERA), specifying five jointly necessary criteria: endogenous self-initiated inquiry, persistent and revisable self-models, internally generated valuation, recursive but bounded self-reflection, and bidirectional internal–external coupling. ERA specifies functional constraints on cognitive architecture while remaining agnostic to substrate. To operationalize the threshold, the paper introduces the Silence Test, which diagnoses whether self-directed activity and history-sensitive self-revision persist when external prompts and reinforcement are withdrawn.
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