The rational creature knows that it can be in error, that it can be deceived. It is thanks to this knowledge that it is capable of becoming reflective. The rational animal is pre-reflective because it has the necessary cognitive endowment to entertain the possibility of its being systematically in error.
Murray Patrick Shanahan is a professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, in the Department of Computing, and a senior scientist at DeepMind. He researches artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science.
