Masafumi Oizumi

Authored papers (1)

• Can Being Aware of the Illusion of Self Augment an Agent's Affordances: Integrating Buddhist Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Life2021

  Awareness of the illusion of self — drawn from Buddhist 'no-self' (anātman) doctrine, contemplative neuroscience, and lucid dreaming research — can expand an agent's affordances, and this claim is amenable to formal modeling via artificial life frameworks. The paper's central move is to map three convergent domains: Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy (specifically Maitreya-Asaṅga's rejection of singular, enduring selves), empirical findings linking 'selfing'-reduction practices to increased social connectedness (Hutcherson, Seppala & Gross, 2008) and prosocial behavior (Luberto et al., 2018 meta-analysis), and artificial life tools including predictive information (Bialek, 2001), empowerment (Klyubin et al., 2008), and integrated information (Tononi et al., 1994). The proposed integrative framework — which the paper terms an artificial life model of illusory selfhood — uses toy cognitive systems to simulate the effects of reduced self-reification without requiring direct interaction with meditating humans, thereby disentangling causal mechanisms. Lucid dreaming, documented to alter environmental affordances by enabling actions unavailable in waking life (Tholey, 1989), serves as a second empirical anchor alongside contemplative practice. The paper argues this implies that non-human intelligences in AI and artificial life, if designed or trained to treat selfhood as distributed and dynamic rather than fixed, may access qualitatively novel ranges of action — potentially yielding new fundamental principles for AI science and new categories of technology.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Recent mentions (2)

• papers-typed

  jingkai-2025-consciousness-observed.md
• papers-typed

  isal_a_00465.md