Florentin Koch

Florentin Koch

When a cognitive system modifies its own functioning, what exactly does it modify: a low-level rule, a control rule, or the norm that evaluates its own revisions? Cognitive science describes executive control, metacognition, and hierarchical learning with precision, but lacks a formal framework distinguishing these targets of transformation. Contemporary artificial intelligence likewise exhibits self-modification without common criteria for comparison with biological cognition. We show that the question of what counts as a self-modifying system entails a minimal structure: a hierarchy of rules, a fixed core, and a distinction between effective rules, represented rules, and causally accessible rules. Four regimes are identified: (1) action without modification, (2) low-level modification, (3) structural modification, and (4) teleological revision. Each regime is anchored in a cognitive phenomenon and a corresponding artificial system. Applied to humans, the framework yields a central result: a crossing of opacities. Humans have self-representation and causal power concentrated at upper hierarchical levels, while operational levels remain largely opaque. Reflexive artificial systems display the inverse profile: rich representation and causal access at operational levels, but none at the highest evaluative level. This crossed asymmetry provides a structural signature for human-AI comparison. The framework also offers insight into artificial consciousness, with higher-order theories and Attention Schema Theory as special cases. We derive four testable predictions and identify four open problems: the independence of transformativity and autonomy, the viability of self-modification, the teleological lock, and identity under transformation.

Florentin Koch

Recent work on artificial consciousness shifts evaluation from behaviour to internal architecture, deriving indicators from theories of consciousness and updating credences accordingly. This is progress beyond naive Turing-style tests. But the indicator-based programme remains epistemically under-calibrated: consciousness science is theoretically fragmented, indicators lack independent validation, and no ground truth of artificial phenomenality exists. Under these conditions, probabilistic consciousness attribution to current AI systems is premature. A more defensible near-term strategy is to redirect effort toward biologically grounded engineering -- biohybrid, neuromorphic, and connectome-scale systems -- that reduces the gap with the only domain where consciousness is empirically anchored: living systems.

Florentin Koch

This article introduces Recursivism as a conceptual framework for analyzing contemporary artistic practices in the age of artificial intelligence. While recursion is precisely defined in mathematics and computer science, it has not previously been formalized as an aesthetic paradigm. Recursivism designates practices in which not only outputs vary over time, but in which the generative process itself becomes capable of reflexive modification through its own effects. The paper develops a five-level analytical scale distinguishing simple iteration, cumulative iteration, parametric recursion, reflexive recursion, and meta-recursion. This scale clarifies the threshold at which a system shifts from variation within a fixed rule to genuine self-modification of the rule itself. From this perspective, art history is reinterpreted as a recursive dynamic alternating between internal recursion within movements and meta-recursive transformations of their generative principles. Artificial intelligence renders this logic technically explicit through learning loops, parameter updates, and code-level self-modification. To distinguish Recursivism from related notions such as generative art, cybernetics, process art, and evolutionary art, the article proposes three operational criteria: state memory, rule evolvability, and reflexive visibility. These concepts are examined through case studies including Refik Anadol, Sougwen Chung, Karl Sims, and the Darwin-Godel Machine. The article concludes by examining the aesthetic, curatorial, and ethical implications of self-modifying artistic systems.