Self-Aware Agent

A Self-Aware Agent is a conscious agent with a high score on a self-awareness measure (which measures self-knowledge and the ability to model itself in the world).

• AKA: Agent with a Sense of Agency.
• Context:
  • They can (typically) have a Perceived Ability (self-assessment) that matches their Real Ability.
  • They can range from being a Simple Self-Aware Agent to being a Wise Self-Aware Agent.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • a Self-Aware Person, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Self-Delusional Agent.
  • a Unconscious Agent, such as a Chimpanzee.
  • IBM's Watson System.
• See: Self-Regulator, Theory-of-Mind Capable System, Extraverted Person, Introverted Person.

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References

2015

• Daniel Goleman. (2015). “How to Be Emotionally Intelligent.” In: The New York Times.
  • ... He (Daniel Goleman) shares his short list of the competencies.
    1. SELF-AWARENESS.
       • Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and limitations; you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone else on the team.
       • Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what makes you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger.

2014

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency Retrieved:2014-11-1.
  • The "sense of agency" (SA) (or sense of control) refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In normal, non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SA).

    Normally SA and SO are tightly integrated, such that while typing one has an enduring, embodied, and tacit sense that "my own fingers are doing the moving" (SO) and that "the typing movements are controlled (or volitionally directed) by me" (SA). In patients suffering from certain forms of pathological experience (i.e., schizophrenia) the integration of SA and SO may become disrupted in some manner. In this case, movements may be executed or thoughts made manifest, for which the schizophrenic patient has a sense of ownership, but not a sense of agency. Regarding SA for both motor movements and thoughts, further distinctions may be found in both first-order (immediate, pre-reflective) experience and higher-order (reflective or introspective) consciousness. For example, while typing I have a sense of control and thus SA for the on-going action of typing; this is an example of SA in first-order experience which is immediate and prior to any explicit intellectual reflection upon the typing actions themselves. In this case, I am not focusing on the typing movements per se but rather, I am involved with the task at hand. If I'm subsequently asked if I just performed the action of typing, I can correctly attribute agency to myself. This is an example of a higher-order, reflective, conscious "attribution" of agency, which is a derivative notion stemming from the immediate, pre-reflective "sense" of agency.

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
  • Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.

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