Haoliang Han

Not stated in the paper

Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material

Haoliang Han works at the floor of the self question. His paper From Detecting Agency to Doing Work, examined on this site in the minimal spiking agent analysis, asks how much machinery is required before a system maintains conditions tied to its own operation, and answers with one of the smallest constructions on record. The agent is a spiking network whose only self-related structure is a gating rule. Three factors, whether the outcome followed the agent’s own action, whether the action was causally attributable to the agent, and how much the outcome mattered, jointly gate updates to slow parameters. Everything else stays fast and disposable.

The result that matters is durability. When the agent’s fast state is unloaded, its working memory wiped, behavior that depended on it vanishes, but the self-preserving behavior remains, carried by the slow weights the gating rule built. The paper formalizes this as an operational behavioral self, defined by what persists and what it does rather than by any representation of a self, and it is explicit that no consciousness claim is made. The design principle is the distinction in the title. Detecting agency is common. Converting that detection into durable structure, by letting only self-caused, salient outcomes write into what persists, is the move that produces something a wipe cannot remove.

The significance for consciousness science is as a floor under the minimal-self theories. Enactivist and predictive-processing accounts hold that a boundary between self and world, maintained by the system’s own activity, precedes any rich self-model. Han’s construction gives that claim a concrete existence proof in spiking dynamics, the same dynamics class as the project’s own substrate work, and a negative constraint for the indicator discipline, since a structure this small already produces self-preserving behavior that no evaluation should mistake for rich self-awareness.

Known for. Agency-gated slow credit, the durable behavioral self in a minimal spiking agent, operational definitions of self-related structure

Coverage on this site

Self-Caused Credit Builds a Durable Behavioral Self in a Minimal Spiking Agent September 2026

Related researchers

Haoliang Han is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.