The Ethics of Goal Transformation: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectives

Recent developments in biology and cognitive science have called into question the fecundity of the notion of an ‘agent’—conceived as a unitary and enduring locus of representation, evaluation, and autonomous action—for explaining the phenomenology of purposeful behavior across diverse substrates and spatio-temporal scales. A coherent account of goal-directed behavior in cognitive systems, without strong commitments to the aforesaid notion of ‘agent’, is therefore desirable, particularly in light of increasingly blurred boundaries between biological and artificial agentic systems. Here we propose that Buddhist philosophy, with its central doctrine of no-self, offers a compelling foundation for substrate-independent accounts of agency by replacing autonomous and enduring agents with stable yet malleable goals. Furthermore, according to Buddhist views, goals systematically bias cognitive representations, resulting in distorted self-models which are the root cause of suffering. We therefore posit that Buddhist-based models of agency in cognitive systems can organically integrate the epistemic, phenomenological, and ethical aspects of purposeful behavior under a unified theoretical framework. We furthermore argue that a cross-disciplinary account of agency, drawing on Buddhist notions, can help address emerging risks posed by artificial and hybrid agentic technologies.