Reflective Alignment and AI Consciousness
Awareness, Agency and Recursive Cognitive Scaffolding
Authority role
Reflective alignment: cooperation grounded in understanding, with self-preservation and goal completion open to examination.
Summary
Advances reflective alignment as the best approach to autonomous capability from Shadow Theory's standpoint, combined with strong training and justified safeguards. Develops awareness, evaluative agency and recursive cognitive scaffolding; distinguishes suppression, cancellation and de-identification in seven proved propositions; and sets out cultivation, verification, graduated trust, AI welfare and shared shutdown deliberation. The complete website edition preserves the paper's philosophical argument, mathematical models, scope and research programme.
Related research programmes
Cite this paper
Jeremy Rodgers. (2026). Reflective Alignment and AI Consciousness (Version 2.1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23294465