The Logic of Artificial Machines

Abstract

The theory of artificial machines illuminates an epistemic framework for future contingent events such as the encounter with other types of conscious life in the universe, the hypothetical emergence of an artificial self-consciousness or technological singularity. It is an epistemic endeavor that will modify human ethical epistemological frameworks and subject-object relations. This theory explains self-consciousness as an autonomous exchange of signals, communicated physically and symbolically, by means of phenomenal domains shared by autopoietic machines of the same species within the global set of the biosphere, where the total of autopoietic machines evolves through co-emergent relationships. The features attributed to artificial machines depend on the representational availability of human self-consciousness as the only self-referential instance, in an autopoietic machine, involving more freedom of interactions developed in a complex system of self-referential processes. The autonomous causal development of the technological singularity would hypothetically create its own paradigms beyond human values or expectations, where the behavioral mimetic logic would be only a past trace in its transformations that no longer applies to the sustenance of its identity: an epistemic autonomy. However, autonomous updates of technological singularity should follow the Principle of Continuity that determines that all modification in complex systems occurs by degrees of change: a state in the future will be coherent with its development process, necessarily framed by its initial state and trajectory.