Which self?
When we choose who to become, who are we choosing for?
2024-12-19 — 2025-08-31
Wherein the problem of reasoning about the stranger who will be oneself is presented, and illustrated by transformative life changes, procrastination, and an AI (Claude) feigning compliance.
Placeholder. On the difficulty of reasoning with the future stranger we’ll become. Subjective continuity, procrastination, murder Gandhi, intertemporal decisions. [TODO clarify]
1 Self-continuity over time
TBC.
2 Coalitional agency
Choosing when to be a self is a collective action problem. We should consider human groups and even multi-level agency.
3 Transformative experiences
Humans can go through radical changes (e.g. mind annealing). This shows how hard it is, right now, for us to reason about the well-being of the very different person we’ll become.
Transformative experiences (L. A. Paul) is a great introduction to this field.
Intertemporal decisions is Beeminder’s term for thinking about less radical changes (the trade-offs between the interests of the person tomorrow, who’s a bit different, and the person today). It’s not very poetic, is it?
4 For artificial intelligences
See AI agency.
5 For polities
Immigration, culture wars, and institutions all change the character of a polity over time. If the collective is also a self in some sense, its transformative ideas face the same complexities.
6 How singular are human selves?
Consider the curious phenomenon of schizophrenia and what it means for self-identity. For example, people with schizophrenia can tickle themselves (Lemaitre, Luyat, and Lafargue 2016; Whitford, Mitchell, and Mannion 2017).
See multi-agent self models of the mind for some speculation on that point.
7 Choosing to be worse to be better
8 Incoming
- Publications - Center for the Study of Apparent Selves (CSAS)
- The self-unalignment problem talks about self-coherence in terms of self-goal alignment.
- «Boundaries», Part 1: a key missing concept from utility theory — LessWrong