From the Existence Domain to the Sustenance Domain: An Alternative View

This paper is the English translation of the Chinese preprint 从存在域到存续域:AI 时代认识论的一个视角 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23758139). Abstract. The rise of artificial intelligence has brought a wave of epistemological discussion, yet one still-solid mainstream current remains within the “existence domain,” asking what knowledge is, how it is constructed, and how it is cognized. Taking three representative works as examples, this paper argues that this mainstream shares a common blind spot: they ask “how knowledge is constructed,” but no one asks “how knowledge sustains itself.” On this basis, the paper introduces the perspective of the “sustenance domain”—shifting the criterion of knowledge from “true / useful” to “whether the system can sustain itself”—and offers an operable prototype of that criterion. This perspective has been systematically developed in the author's related work; the present paper serves only as an introduction, aiming to offer a different view for epistemology in the age of AI. The broader theoretical framework (Dynamic Sustenance Theory, DST) is documented at https://zhishuixue.com/.