From Detecting Agency to Doing Work: Self-Caused Credit Builds a Durable Behavioral Self in a Minimal Spiking Agent
How does an agent that can tell self from world come to be durably shaped by that distinction? Recent work shows that a predictive system can detect its own agency (Ye, 2026), but detecting agency does not explain durable, self-shaped behavior. We show that agency-gated slow credit -- a conjunctive term Own*Agency*Salience driving a slow parameter update -- produces post-unload behavioral residue: on a spiking substrate (Nengo LIF/PES), a learned self-preserving choice survives episodic buffer removal (retained fraction 0.96, N=50) and collapses when the slow decoders are reset or the agency gate is removed. Reproducing the agency comparator and toggling only the slow-credit channel, we f...
| Authors | Haoliang Han |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 29 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 June 2026 |
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