to me, self awareness seems like a matter of what language you use, whether your verbs and adjectives confer agency to the machine doing something "itself"

it reminds me of the debate around language use in science education, I always like to frame interactions as "wants", a positively charged magnet "wants" to move towards negative and so on, but a coworker would always correct me, the inanimate objects want for nothing, they simply act according to laws of physics

but I guess i'm just rehashing an old debate on a cool new project, I like what they've done here, I just noticed the language in the article is obtusely skewed towards what the robot does itself, and not what the robot was programmed to do

learning a proprioceptive model experimentally is a real neat idea. Good job folks