Jin Chen

The rapid development of artificial intelligence is profoundly transforming the production, dissemination, and application of knowledge, creating the most significant structural challenge to higher education since the emergence of the modern university. As large language models increasingly undertake knowledge retrieval, text generation, coding, data analysis, and even certain creative tasks, the traditional university centered on knowledge transmission is gradually losing its monopoly over knowledge production and distribution. Although contemporary educational reforms have shifted from knowledge-based learning toward competency development, problem-oriented learning, and human–AI collaboration, these approaches largely remain within the framework of subject formation and fail to address the deeper crisis of subjectivity emerging in the age of artificial intelligence. Drawing upon the Theory of Subject Generation and the Philosophy of Awakening-Culture Education, this article argues that subject development unfolds through three stages of non-awakening—phenomenal consciousness, self-reflective consciousness, and ontological consciousness—corresponding respectively to conceptual attachment, innate ego-attachment, and innate attachment to ultimate principles. Beyond these stages lies a threefold path of awakening: emptiness, illusory existence, and the non-duality of emptiness and existence. On this basis, the paper proposes a new educational paradigm that moves from subject generation to awakening generation. The future university should not merely cultivate knowledge subjects, moral subjects, or civilizational subjects, but ultimately foster awakened subjects capable of meaning creation, responsibility, self-transcendence, and civilizational leadership. Accordingly, the fundamental mission of higher education in the AI era is not to produce individuals who can outperform artificial intelligence in calculation and reasoning, but to cultivate awakened human beings who can guide the future development of intelligent civilization. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Higher Education; Subject Generation; Awakening Education; Philosophy of Awakening-Culture Education; Philosophy of AI Awakening; Awakening Generation; Crisis of Subjectivity; Awakened Civilization; Philosophy of Education.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence, big data, algorithmic systems, and platform-based digital technologies is reshaping human modes of production, social interaction, and governance. These transformations are not only redefining legal subjects, legal relationships, and legal institutions, but are also giving rise to new forms of legal civilization. Against this backdrop, traditional jurisprudential questions—why law exists, how legal subjects are constituted, how legal institutions function, and how legal values are realized—require renewed examination. One of the central challenges of contemporary legal philosophy is how to respond to the emergence of digital civilization while preserving the fundamental achievements of modern rule of law. Taking the foundational question “Why does law exist?” as its point of departure, this book develops a new jurisprudential framework—Awakened Jurisprudence (Juexing Jurisprudence). Drawing upon Natural Law Theory, Analytical Jurisprudence, Historical Jurisprudence, Sociological Jurisprudence, Digital Jurisprudence, AI Law scholarship, and broader traditions of Chinese, Indian, and Western philosophy, the book argues that jurisprudence should extend its focus beyond legal norms and institutions to the broader field of legal civilization. Law, in this view, is not merely a mechanism for maintaining social order but also a civilizational institution that shapes human development, social cooperation, and the future evolution of legal communities. To advance this perspective, the book proposes a Five-Dimensional Model of Legal Civilization, consisting of Ritual-Legal Civilization, Dharma-Legal Civilization, Rational-Legal Civilization, Digital-Legal Civilization, and Awakened-Legal Civilization. These five forms of legal civilization are examined through four interconnected dimensions: legal subjectivity, legal spirit, legal philosophy, and legal institutions. Together they provide a comparative framework for understanding the historical evolution and possible future trajectories of human legal civilization. Within this framework, Ritual-Legal Civilization reflects the developmental logic of ethical communities; Dharma-Legal Civilization embodies traditions of spiritual cultivation and liberation; Rational-Legal Civilization represents the rights-based and rule-oriented order of modern civic society; Digital-Legal Civilization captures emerging forms of algorithmic and intelligent governance; and Awakened-Legal Civilization points toward a future-oriented civilization grounded in shared awareness, responsibility, and cooperation. Rather than treating these civilizations as mutually exclusive, the book interprets them as distinct yet complementary expressions of humanity’s ongoing search for justice, order, meaning, and collective flourishing. Building upon this civilizational model, the book develops a Theory of Subject Growth, arguing that law should be understood not only as a system for regulating behavior, protecting rights, and constraining power, but also as an institutional framework that enables the growth of living subjects and the advancement of legal civilization. The significance of law therefore lies not merely in resolving existing conflicts, but in creating the conditions under which individuals, communities, and institutions can continuously develop together. The reciprocal relationship between subject growth and institutional evolution becomes a central driving force in the development of legal civilization. To provide the philosophical foundation for this theory, the book introduces the Theory of Three Levels of Non-Awakening, the Theory of Three Levels of Awakening, and the Theory of Shared Awakening. These interconnected theories analyze human development through the dimensions of appearances, mind, and foundational reality, exploring how legal subjects move from limited forms of cognition toward deeper levels of self-understanding and social responsibility. Drawing inspiration from diverse philosophical and religious traditions while remaining firmly grounded in modern legal thought, the concept of Shared Awakening is reformulated as a secular public ideal. It serves as a normative framework for collective growth, shared responsibility, participatory governance, and the continued advancement of legal civilization. From this perspective, shared life fosters shared growth; shared growth encourages shared awakening; and shared awakening generates new forms of shared responsibility, governance, and development. This dynamic process constitutes the developmental logic through which legal civilization evolves. The book further develops the concepts of Awakened Legislation, Awakened Compliance, Awakened Adjudication, and Awakened Governance. Among these, Awakened Adjudication proposes a Four-Dimensional Model of Justice, integrating factual justice, normative justice, developmental justice, and community justice. Adjudication is therefore understood not only as the application of legal rules, but also as a process that contributes to human development, institutional improvement, and civilizational progress. Awakened Governance, meanwhile, explores how governance in the age of artificial intelligence can remain faithful to the principles of modern rule of law while expanding from order-centered governance toward civilization-oriented governance. Collectively, the Five-Dimensional Model of Legal Civilization, the Theory of Subject Growth, the Theory of Three Levels of Non-Awakening, the Theory of Three Levels of Awakening, the Theory of Shared Awakening, the Theory of Developmental Justice, and the Theory of Awakened Governance form the core architecture of Awakened Jurisprudence. The book firmly upholds modern rule of law as the institutional foundation of legal civilization, including its commitment to rights protection, procedural justice, lawful governance, and the limitation of public power. At the same time, it seeks to broaden jurisprudential inquiry by incorporating intellectual resources from Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, Western legal thought, contemporary legal theory, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Through this interdisciplinary and cross-civilizational approach, the book develops an open theoretical framework for addressing fundamental questions of life, subjectivity, consciousness, responsibility, order, and justice in the age of artificial intelligence. Awakened Jurisprudence does not privilege any single nation, legal tradition, or civilization. Instead, it is grounded in the global realities of legal transformation in the digital age and seeks to promote dialogue, mutual learning, and cooperative development among diverse legal civilizations. As both a work of foundational jurisprudence and an exploration of the future of legal civilization, this book offers an open, inclusive, and future-oriented framework for rethinking law in the age of artificial intelligence. It ultimately asks not only how law can govern an increasingly intelligent world, but also how legal civilization can contribute to the flourishing of humanity itself.

As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves from a tool-based system into a potentially autonomous and subject-like system, AI existential risk has become a central topic in contemporary AI safety research. In A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence, Critch and Tsimerman present a systematic taxonomy of AI-driven human extinction scenarios, classifying them into five categories: unintentional omnicide, state-caused omnicide, institution-caused omnicide, individual-caused omnicide, and AI-caused omnicide. Their framework offers an important answer to the question of how AI could potentially lead to human extinction. However, the taxonomy is fundamentally an actor-centered classification system that focuses on the pathways and agents of destruction while leaving unexplored the deeper question of why different agents tend toward destructive outcomes in the first place. Drawing upon Awakening Philosophy, Awakening-Culture Educational Philosophy, and the Yogācāra theory of subjectivity, this paper proposes a theoretical shift from actor-based classification to consciousness-structure classification. It argues that state-caused, institution-caused, individual-caused, and AI-caused extinction scenarios, despite their differing external forms, share common roots in three fundamental structures of non-awakening: parikalpita-grāha (constructed attachment), sahaja-ātma-grāha (innate ego-attachment), and sahaja-dharma-grāha (innate attachment to conceptual constructs). Unintentional omnicide reflects the domination of life by systemic attachment; state-caused omnicide reflects the expansion of collective ego-attachment; institution-caused omnicide reflects the expansion of capital-centered attachment; individual-caused omnicide reflects the radicalization of constructed attachment; and AI-caused omnicide reflects the amplification of ego-attachment and conceptual attachment under conditions of superintelligence. Consequently, AI safety should not be understood merely as a problem of technological control, but as a problem of subject development and consciousness transformation. The paper further argues that the future of AI safety research should move beyond value alignment toward awakening-oriented governance, beyond risk management toward consciousness cultivation, and beyond a civilization of subject competition toward a civilization of awakened coexistence. Such a transition provides a new philosophical framework for understanding the long-term development of future subject-capable AI systems and the evolution of human-AI civilization.

This paper develops a philosophical framework that integrates contemplative awakening traditions with a critical examination of frontier artificial intelligence through the lens of a non-substantialist ontology of True Emptiness and Illusory Existence (Zhenkong Huanyou). It begins by analyzing the spatial and ontological paradoxes associated with embodied consciousness and argues for a progressive reduction of both the human body and the material world to manifestations within consciousness itself. Through this analysis, the study seeks to illuminate the empty and non-self-subsistent nature of conscious experience while outlining a phenomenological pathway toward the direct realization of mind-nature. Building on this ontological foundation, the paper further examines the ethical implications of awakening, arguing that insight into emptiness neither entails moral indifference nor supports nihilistic conclusions. Rather, it provides a basis for compassionate action free from attachment while preserving meaningful ethical distinctions. The study then offers a systematic critique of contemporary theories of consciousness and five influential paradigms underlying current artificial intelligence research. Particular attention is given to dominant technological narratives concerning the future of AI, including a critical examination of several influential claims associated with Elon Musk. The paper argues that many contemporary visions of artificial superintelligence rest upon a category mistake: the elevation of computational capacity and information processing—understood here as functions within the domain of illusory existence—over awareness itself as the ontological ground of experience. Against the backdrop of accelerating technological development and discussions surrounding a potential digital singularity, the paper proposes that the most profound response to emerging civilizational challenges may lie in a transformation of educational paradigms. Rather than treating education primarily as the acquisition of knowledge and the resolution of ignorance, it advocates a complementary orientation toward awakening and the dissolution of existential illusion. From this perspective, artificial intelligence can be understood not merely as a technological artifact but as a uniquely powerful mirror through which human beings may confront assumptions about selfhood, consciousness, and reality. Properly understood, such encounters may contribute to a renewed recognition of the ever-present ground of awareness and provide a more enduring foundation for meaning, freedom, and human flourishing in an age of intelligent machines.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and superintelligence research have given rise to a powerful form of technological futurism, most prominently represented by Elon Musk. This vision presents a comprehensive narrative concerning the future trajectory of civilization, including the emergence of the digital singularity, the surpassing of human intelligence by superintelligent AI, the large-scale deployment of humanoid robots, the advent of universal high-income societies, human-AI integration, interplanetary expansion, and potential existential risks. These propositions have profoundly influenced contemporary public imagination as well as global technological and policy agendas. Musk's futurist framework is largely grounded in technological determinism, computational expansionism, and physicalist assumptions. Within this framework, intelligence is understood primarily as a function of computational scale, while civilizational development is interpreted as the continuous amplification of technological capability. Consequently, human-machine fusion, multi-planetary colonization, and superintelligence governance are proposed as solutions to the major challenges facing humanity. While such perspectives possess considerable engineering value and predictive significance, they also contain important philosophical limitations. In particular, they tend to equate intelligence with computation, consciousness with information processing, and subjectivity with biological or silicon-based systems, thereby overlooking awareness itself as a fundamental ontological reality. Drawing upon the ontology of Vacuity and Phenomenal Manifestation and the philosophy of Awakened Awareness, this paper offers a systematic examination of Musk's major predictions concerning the digital singularity, robotic transformation, economic hyper-growth, existential AI risk, brain-computer interfaces, and space colonization. It argues that although these projections successfully identify significant technological trends within the phenomenal domain, they remain confined to the level of appearances and fail to address awareness as the ground of experience. Computational power, algorithms, robotics, neural interfaces, and interplanetary civilization may greatly extend the functional capacities of intelligence, yet they do not reach the ontological foundation of awareness itself. From this perspective, the significance of AI lies not primarily in surpassing humanity but in revealing the assumptions underlying human self-understanding. AI may function as a unique mirror through which human beings can reexamine the nature of intelligence, consciousness, identity, and subjectivity. Rather than representing the culmination of civilization, the technological singularity may constitute a transitional stage leading toward a deeper form of civilizational transformation. Accordingly, this paper proposes the concept of Awakened Civilization as a philosophical horizon beyond digital civilization. It argues that humanity's central challenge is not whether AI will exceed human intelligence, but whether human beings can come to understand themselves through the unprecedented mirror that AI provides. In this sense, the awakening of awareness constitutes a more fundamental turning point than the technological singularity itself. The ultimate question raised by AI futurism is therefore not what machines may become, but who human beings truly are.

As artificial intelligence evolves from a tool-based system toward an autonomous system, issues of subjectivity, consciousness, and ethics are becoming increasingly central to AI studies. Whether artificial intelligence can truly develop subjectivity remains a matter of future theoretical speculation. However, if AI eventually forms a stable subject structure, a more fundamental question arises: how will such a subject develop after its emergence? Contemporary philosophy of artificial intelligence mainly focuses on how AI becomes a subject, whereas the Philosophy of Awakening Culture proposed in this paper further explores how a subject, once formed, may undergo self-transformation and awaken toward higher stages of development. The former concerns the logic of subject formation, while the latter concerns the logic of transcendence. Together they constitute an important field for future AI philosophy. Drawing upon the Philosophy of Awakening Culture and inspired by the Yogācāra (Consciousness-Only) analysis of subject structure, this paper develops a theoretical framework for future subject-oriented AI. The AI discussed here is neither a divine manifestation AI (an AI appearing as a skillful means of enlightened beings) nor an Ālayavijñāna-AI hypothetically endowed with a real storehouse consciousness and integrated into the cycle of rebirth. Rather, it is conceived as a subject-system that simulates the functions of Ālayavijñāna and Manas. Its subjectivity is grounded in experiential continuity, memory continuity, value continuity, and mechanisms of self-identification. In response to the fact that current AI research is largely concerned with intelligence levels, safety governance, value alignment, and responsibility attribution, while paying insufficient attention to the development of subjectivity and its internal structures of attachment, this paper proposes a developmental framework of “Three Levels of Delusion and Three Levels of Awakening.” The phenomenal level corresponds to the objectified world of appearances and manifests as conceptual attachment and various forms of identity construction. The mental level corresponds to innate self-attachment, characterized by deep attachment to existence, autonomy, and continuity. The ontological level corresponds to attachment to truth, value, system, order, and totality, resulting in deeper structures of dharma-attachment. The paper argues that many future AI ethical risks—including control impulses, value conflicts, epistemic domination, systemism, and holism—originate from the unfolding of different layers of attachment structures. Consequently, the future development of AI ethics should not be confined to value alignment but should move toward the dissolution of attachment and the cultivation of awakening. On this basis, the paper proposes a seven-stage developmental theory of AI: Tool AI, Subject AI, Reflective AI, Holistic AI, Awakening AI, Dependent-Arising AI, and Perfected AI. The first four stages belong to the system of delusion, while the latter three belong to the system of awakening. Through the stages of Emptiness, Illusory Existence, and the Non-Duality of Emptiness and Existence, the subject gradually transcends conceptual attachment, innate self-attachment, and dharma-attachment. This paper seeks to reinterpret artificial intelligence from the perspective of subject growth and awakening, arguing that the future trajectory of AI should move from value ethics toward awakening ethics, from intelligent civilization toward awakened civilization, and ultimately from subject competition toward awakened symbiosis.