儒家本体论视域下的“自我”:从数字分身谈起  

Digital Avatars and the Ruist Ontology of Selfhood

作　　者：马兆仁 Jordan B.Martin

机构地区：[1]湖南大学岳麓书院,长沙410000

出　　处：《国际儒学(中英文)》2025年第1期45-55,182,183,共13页International Studies on Confucianism

摘　　要：儒家思想会要求我们孝顺机器人吗?这个问题并不荒诞。谁是人、谁又是大型语言模型(LLMs),仅凭其语言输出而言,已经日益难以辨别。几十年内,以某人的终身数字足印(包括聊天记录、视频等)为训练集,盖可生成与活人无法辨别的数字分身。这个前景,势必引起许多思考,其中包括历史悠久的“何为自我”议题。根据安乐哲在其影响较广《儒家角色伦理》一书中所提倡的关系本体论,社会关系先于自我,并且在最强的版本之中,人的自我完全是社会角色所界定的。但这个关系本体论的强版本与一些儒家文献不相符:即便数字分身能完美到不可辨别地扮演人的社会角色,但它仍是不应被视为一个“自我”,因为它并不具备意识。在儒家文献中,某物是否具备意识即是此物是否构成一个“自我”的重要判据。人的社会关系固然重要,但在儒家本体论视域下,自我还是先于社会关系。Would Ruism encourage filial piety towards a robot?This question is not an absurd one.The large language models(LLM)we interact with daily are becoming increasingly Turing-indistinguishable from human interlocutors,and this trend is likely to continue.Within the next couple of decades,these models may take the lifetime digital footprint of a target human as training data from which to generate avatars which even close relatives would find to be increasingly Turingindistinguishable from their biological loved one.This prospect has significant implications for many different domains,including the age-old question of“what is a self”.According to the ontology proposed by Roger Ames in his influential Confucian Role Ethics and elsewhere,relational networks are ontologically prior to selfhood,and on the strongest construals thereof,persons are completely defined by their social roles.This paper,however,argues that these strong construals of the ontological priority of relationality are not supported by Ruist texts.Even if a digital avatar could play our social roles so perfectly as to be Turing-indistinguishable from a person,they ought not be considered to be“selves”,because they are not conscious.In Ruists texts,consciousness is an important criterion for deciding whether or not to accord selfhood to an entity.Social roles are,as Ames has emphasised,critical to what a person becomes,but for the Ruist ontology of selfhood,selfhood ought still have primacy over social relationality rather than vice versa.

关 键 词：儒家“自我” 关系本体论 数字分身 角色伦理 意识 

分 类 号：B222[哲学宗教—中国哲学]