Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Self — what a self is — the minimal, bodily and pre-reflective self, self-models and the sense of being a subject, the self as process or as context, and whether machines or groups can be selves. Not the person, which is personhood (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
7 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-046 v2 | A partner-dancing couple, lindy hop, tango or salsa, while they dance | The owner’s case (2026-10-11). Two social dancers improvise together. The lead proposes through the frame, the follow interprets and adds styling, and each corrects for the other’s balance and timing. Neither alone decides where the next step lands. Used to ask what the pair is while dancing, and only after that whether it is a self. | Active |
| CASE-052 | Stokely Carmichael’s two speaking styles, kept apart by audience and collapsed by broadcast | As boyd (2008) reports it after Meyrowitz (1985: 43): the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael used very different rhetorical styles with black and with white audiences. While the audiences were separate the two styles did not conflict. Television and radio put both audiences in front of one speech, there was no neutral style, and his choice of one alienated the other audience. The roles did not change. The cover did. | Active |
| CASE-114 v5 | The imagined owner | A27’s Experiment C, of the exchange of 2026-10-17: two computational systems with equivalent distributed control and similar behaviour, one with a self-model that represents the actual division of labour, the other with one that represents a single centralized inner agent. If the second systematically misattributes control, that is a concrete model of illusory authorship, located in the attribution. Proposed, not run, and it tests attribution of control, not phenomenal properties. | Active |
| CASE-137 v2 | Clive Wearing: a musician left by encephalitis with almost no memory of his past and none of the last minutes, who still plays, sight-reads and conducts, keeps his attachment to his wife, and writes over and over that he has just become conscious for the first time | The owner’s case, proposed at U26 of the exchange of 2026-10-22 (“if we haven’t already examined the case of Clive Wearing, that might be another good addition”). The record had no amnesia case. It separates skill and short-horizon organization, which persist, from autobiographical continuity and experienced ownership of one’s past, which do not. Not shown by it: that the unity of his present experience is an illusion, or that his denials of past consciousness are evidence of its absence. | Active |
| CASE-140 | The attributed self: two people with similar dispositions hear the same negative characterization, one told it comes from a few critics and the other believing it speaks for nearly everyone who matters to them, so that the words are fixed and only their attributed breadth differs | A39’s proposed test of the imagined audience, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request. It holds the content of a judgement fixed and varies only the social authority the hearer attributes to it. A39: “These cases distinguish the content of a judgment from the social authority attributed to it.” As stipulated it predicts nothing; run with real people, it would test CLAIM-415. | Active |
| CASE-141 v2 | The label that confirms itself: a pupil wrongly labelled disruptive is watched more closely, ordinary conduct is read as misconduct, the pupil’s frustration produces real misconduct, and the label looks justified in hindsight | A39’s second reading of “I am whatever you say I am”, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request with its variant CASE-142. An attribution can produce the conduct that later seems to justify it, through the institution’s response to the attribution, not through the pupil’s coming to believe it. Not shown: how often labels work this way; A39: “That’s a possible self-fulfilling process, not a universal consequence of stigmatizing labels.” | Active |
| CASE-142 v2 | The label confirmed by resistance: a critic calls someone hostile, the person answers the characterization angrily, and the critic cites the anger as proof, so the judgement is confirmed by the response of someone who rejects it | A39’s third reading of “I am whatever you say I am”, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request as a variant of CASE-141. What differs is the route: the judgement is rejected, not absorbed, and the rejection is what confirms it. A39: “Here an interpretive regime partially manufactures the evidence it uses to justify itself.” Not shown: that resistance always confirms; the person can also answer the judgement without the answer being read as evidence for it. | Active |