Which self?

Individuation, speciation. 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.

economics
ethics
extended self
gene
incentive mechanisms
institutions
mind
utility

Placeholder. On the difficulty of reasoning with the future stranger we’ll become. Subjective continuity, procrastination, murder Gandhi, intertemporal decisions.

1 Self-continuity over time

See intertemporal decisions for now.

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 For artificial intelligences

See AI agency.

4 In RL

I know this is weird, but stay with me. Self in Q-learning is a bit weird; I get a reward for being in a state which is to do with how good that state can be. How does this work? It seems to work because the rewards is in fact distributed by the correct distribution function in the limit, so we do reliably get the reward we predict when starting from such states. When can animals do that?

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 Incoming

8 References

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