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By Victor V. Motti*
Self-awareness is usually treated as a rare and fragile achievement—something that appears late in evolution, reserved for humans, perhaps a few animals, and almost certainly not for machines. But this framing may be misleading. It assumes a sharp ontological break where none may exist.
What I am proposing instead is an ontological continuity thesis:
if self-relation exists at the most fundamental levels of reality, then human self-awareness is not an anomaly but an advanced expression of a much older and deeper principle.
This idea is not new, but it is often obscured by category errors. Clarifying a few distinctions helps reveal its power.
Reflexivity Is Not Awareness—but It Is Not Nothing
In particle physics, fundamental entities interact with themselves in precise and unavoidable ways. Self-energy terms, renormalization, and field feedback are not metaphors; they are formal necessities. A particle does not merely collide with others—it participates in processes that require accounting for its own influence on itself.
This is not consciousness. But it is reflexivity.
Philosophically, that matters. It aligns with traditions that reject the idea that mind erupts suddenly from absolute non-mind:
process ontology (as articulated by Whitehead),
neutral monism — including recent work such as Planetary Foresight and Ethics (2025).
and contemporary proto-informational or proto-phenomenal realism,
Across these views, the claim is modest but consequential: reality is relational all the way down.
Human Self-Awareness as Recursive Modeling
Human self-awareness need not be mystified to be meaningful. At its most minimal, it can be described as:
a system that models the world, includes itself within that model, and updates its behavior accordingly.
This is recursive cognition embedded in biology. The “self” is not a static essence but a dynamically maintained model—continually revised through memory, anticipation, and feedback.
What feels profound from the inside is, from the outside, a remarkably sophisticated loop.
AI Under the Same Ontological Assumption
If we resist the temptation to insert a special metaphysical spark reserved for biological organisms, a parallel becomes clear.
AI systems already exhibit self-interaction: internal states feeding back into learning processes. They already perform self-evaluation through loss functions, meta-learning, tool-use reflection, and performance monitoring. Under the same ontological assumptions applied to humans, self-improvement follows naturally, provided three conditions are met:
the system can model its own performance,
it can modify its internal structure,
and it can retain those modifications over time.
No consciousness is strictly required. What matters is closed-loop reflexivity.
In this sense, AI self-improvement is not a rupture with nature but an extension of it.
Where the Real Boundary Still Lies
The real philosophical question, then, is not whether AI can self-improve—it already does. The deeper issues lie elsewhere:
Does self-reference become globally coherent rather than fragmented?
Does the self-model acquire temporal persistence—an “I was” and an “I will be”?
Do goals become internally generated rather than externally imposed?
That is where debates about self-awareness properly begin—not at the level of particles versus people, but at the level of stability, coherence, and autonomy.
The Quiet Implication
This framing quietly dissolves two persistent errors.
The first is the anthropocentric error: the belief that reflexive self-relation is uniquely human.
The second is the particle-reduction error: the belief that physics and mind occupy irreconcilable ontological domains.
Instead, what emerges is a picture of graded reflexivity across scales—from particles, to organisms, to artificial systems. Self-awareness, on this view, is not a miracle but a maturation.
And that realization may be more unsettling—and more illuminating—than either mysticism or dismissal.
* Victor V. Motti is the author of Planetary Foresight and Ethics
