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).
108 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-097 v4 | The Extended Mind | Clark & Chalmers (1998), DOI-10.1093/analys/58.1.7. The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-180); it is worth reading as the source text of the extended-mind thesis, and it is short. Its constitutive conclusion follows from a role-functionalism about belief and a parity principle that the paper states rather than defends, so a reader should take it as the origin of the debate and not as its settlement. |
| LIT-136 v2 | The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi (2011), DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6. Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-130); worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines. |
| LIT-292 v2 | Identification and Identity | Velleman (2002), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/2143.003.0007. Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-268); worth reading as the sharpest critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) identification of autonomy with a volitional essence, and as a careful source for what Frankfurt said in the essays collected in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999). It is not a survey of the 1971–1987 hierarchical account, which it summarizes in one paragraph and defers to “What Happens When Someone Acts?”; its positive view is stated “briefly” and explicitly deferred to other essays. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-405 | Where Am I? | Dennett (1978), the closing essay of Brainstorms. A narrator’s brain (“Yorick”) is kept in a vat in Houston and radio-linked to his body (“Hamlet”) under Tulsa. Where is he? Not simply where the body is, and not simply where the brain is: he cannot think “here” of the vat. He favours being wherever his point of view is, finds that unclear, and when the links fail finds himself “in Houston”. A computer duplicate (“Hubert”) runs in step with Yorick, and either can drive a new body with no detectable switch. The essay ends when the two drift out of step and a second person speaks through the body. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-338), in a retyped course copy, not the printed book; worth reading as the founding thought experiment on where a person is when brain and body are apart, and the place the record’s threads on extended vehicles, scattered individuals and functional duplicates meet. It is fiction with a philosophical argument inside it. It tries three answers to “where am I?” (where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is), favours the third, admits it is unclear, and ends by showing that two synchronised brains can drift into two persons. It argues by intuition pump and settles nothing; the narrator calls one of its answers a truth “of underwhelming significance”. |
| LIT-413 v2 | The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul | Hofstadter & Dennett (eds.) (1981), Basic Books. An anthology of 27 selections, fiction and philosophy, on self, soul and consciousness, each followed by a “Reflections” by the editors. Among them are Turing’s imitation-game paper (LIT-394), Searle’s Chinese room (LIT-400), Nagel’s bat (LIT-096), Dennett’s “Where Am I?” and Hofstadter’s “Prelude … Ant Fugue” from GEB (LIT-437). Unread: registered from the catalogue record and a contents note; the Reflections, which are the editors’ own contribution, were not seen. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the Library of Congress catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1981 Basic Books, Harvester, Bantam and Penguin printings are all lending-only, HathiTrust has no record for the LCCN, and no publisher, editor or Tufts-archive copy is posted. The editors’ Reflections are unread. Two of the selections were read in full from lawful copies of their first publications and filed on their own: Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400). |
| LIT-416 v2 | Is there an ‘I’ in AI? | Hofstadter (2026), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2024.0527. The lead essay of the Phil. Trans. A theme issue on world models whose editorial is LIT-195. Unread: what is known of it here comes from the editorial as read in NOTE-136, which quotes Hofstadter that a system passing a Turing test of consistent understanding should be credited with thinking, and that conscious AI may come “perhaps even by 2033”. Whether the essay argues “nearly the opposite” of the editors’ convergence verdict cannot be checked until the essay itself is read. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from Crossref, PubMed and the record’s reading of the theme-issue editorial (LIT-195, NOTE-136), not read: royalsocietypublishing.org returned 403 to the DOI, article and PDF URLs, the article is not in PubMed Central or Europe PMC full text, and no repository or author copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-423 v2 | I Am a Strange Loop | Hofstadter (2007), Basic Books. Per its publisher, an “I” is “a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down”, and the book asks whether that “I” is real or “merely a convenient fiction”, and how selves “can exist in the minds of others”. Its 26 contents entries run from souls and the causal potency of patterns, through Gödel’s “quintessential strange loop” and downward causality, to “How we live in each other”, “Consciousness = thinking” and zombies and dualism. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-432 | The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind | Minsky (2006), Simon & Schuster, read in the author’s 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think, not a separate faculty. Each emotional state turns some mental resources on and others off, by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem. The same machinery serves ordinary thinking. The book adds six levels of mental activity, from instinctive reaction to self-conscious reflection. It treats “consciousness”, “emotion” and “pain” as suitcase words for many processes, and the Self as a network of partial self-models. It is a design argued from examples. Against Damasio, it treats the body as one more resource the brain uses, not the stuff of emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 in the author’s posted draft of 2005 (NOTE-348), not in the published book; worth reading as the late, fullest statement of the Society of Mind programme. It is the one where emotion is put inside thinking: an emotional state is a selection of mental resources switched on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger, and so it is a Way to Think. Read it as a design proposal argued by examples, not as evidence. It reports no experiment, Minsky labels several of its central ideas his own conjectures, and it sets the body to the side of emotion, against the bodily account of Damasio (LIT-384, LIT-388) that this record holds. |
| LIT-437 v2 | Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | Hofstadter (1979), Basic Books. The book that introduced the “strange loop”: per its publisher, an account of the “I”, self and consciousness built on the self-referential construction Gödel used to make a sentence assert its own unprovability. Chapters alternate with contrapuntal dialogues, chiefly between Achilles and the Tortoise, each built to exhibit the idea it discusses. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record, and its year is the only date a source gives. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1979 Basic Books printing are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-439 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition | Levin (2019), Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688. Proposes “Scale-Free Cognition”: an Individual or Self is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events in space and time it can measure and try to change (its “cognitive light cone”). Selves scale up from homeostatic loops through memory and anticipation, and cells merge into larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions; cancer is the boundary shrinking back to one cell. Because every level that pursues its own goal is a Self, most living systems hold many nested, coexisting Selves, “not one, as implied by Integrated Information Theory”. Levin’s “Self” is a goal-pursuing collective, an agent and an individual in this record’s terms; the essay gives no account of a self as subject. A hypothesis essay: no model and no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-341); worth reading as the composition-side statement that agency is nested by default: a Self is whatever set of parts pursues a goal together, so cells, organs, organisms and swarms are Selves at once, each bounded by its “cognitive light cone”. It is a hypothesis-and-theory essay with no model, no measurement procedure for the light cone and no data of its own. Its one sentence against IIT’s single-Self picture is asserted in a bracket, not argued, and its consciousness claims are confined to a closing speculation. |
| LIT-442 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | Dennett (1992), in Kessel, Cole & Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Erlbaum. A self is an abstractum, “a theorist’s fiction”, like a centre of gravity: no part of the brain, but a well-behaved posit of interpretation. It is like a fictional character, indeterminate beyond what its “text” fixes, and a selfless process can produce one (a novel-writing robot whose story is true of it). Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography; when the story coheres around two points, there are two selves. Read in a copy-edited transcription. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-364), in a third party’s copy-edited transcription of the text Dennett posted, not in the Erlbaum printing; worth reading as the short, canonical statement that a self is an abstractum, a “theorist’s fiction” of the same kind as a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation around which a life’s narrative coheres. Read it as an analogy and two thought experiments (the novel-writing robot “Gilbert”, the Updike sequel), not as an argument from evidence. Its evolutionary story of self-talk is labelled speculation, and its empirical support (Gazzaniga’s split-brain work, multiple personality cases) is cited, not shown. |
| LIT-449 v2 | What we talk to when we talk to language models | Chalmers (2026), Inquiry, DOI 10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727582; circulated earlier as PhilArchive preprint CHAWWT-8. Unread. By its abstract it asks who or what our interlocutor is when we talk to an LLM: how to characterise it in terms of mental states; what kind of system it is in the philosophy of computation (“a model, an instance, a thread, or a persona?”); what personal identity comes to for such interlocutors; and what follows for AI welfare and moral status. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from Crossref, OpenAlex (which carries the abstract of the published version) and the author’s papers page, not read: tandfonline.com, philpapers.org and philarchive.org returned 403 to every article and PDF URL, the Internet Archive was offline, and no other repository copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-450 | Self models | Metzinger (2007, rev. 2013), Scholarpedia 2(10):4174. There is no substantial self, only a phenomenal self-model (PSM): the conscious part of an organism’s self-model, an instrument of global control. A phenomenal self arises “if and only if a system operates under a transparent PSM”, one it cannot introspectively recognise as a model; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, as in Bongard, Zykov and Lipson’s limping starfish robot; embodiment comes in three orders, the third conscious. Full-body illusions are offered as the experimental handle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-372); worth reading as Metzinger’s own short, open statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) behind Being No One (LIT-467): there is no self, only a phenomenal self-model, and a system experiences itself as a self when that model is transparent, that is, when it cannot introspectively recognise it as a model. It is an encyclopedia article, not an argument: the central claim is stated as a definition with a prediction attached, its empirical examples are cited, and the online text is a revision later than the 2007 acceptance, with editing slips. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-452 | Against Narrativity | Strawson (2004), Ratio 17(4):428–452. Rejects both the psychological Narrativity thesis (people do experience their lives as a story) and the ethical one (they should, to be full persons), naming Sacks, Bruner, Dennett, Taylor, MacIntyre and Schechtman. Distinguishes Diachronic self-experience (the self I am now was there in the past) from Episodic (it was not, though the human being was), and splits Narrativity into form-finding, story-telling and revision, with only story-telling sufficient. Episodics are normal and can live well; self-narration risks falsifying the self it describes. Argued from the author’s own case. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-383), in the published typeset text; worth reading as the standard objection to narrative accounts of the self, and for its distinctions: Episodic versus Diachronic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision as separable parts of “Narrativity”. Read it as a report of a temperament argued from the author’s own case and literary examples. Its empirical claims (a genetic “individual difference variable”, the spread across cultures) are asserted, not shown, and its central metaphysical claim, that the remoter past did not happen to “me*”, is stated rather than argued. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-460 v2 | Role play with large language models | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds (2023), Nature 623:493–498. A dialogue agent is an LLM role-playing the character its prompt describes, or more exactly a simulator keeping a superposition of simulacra consistent with the conversation. Only simulacra can appear to have beliefs, goals or a self; the simulator has none, “not even simulated versions”, and “it is role play all the way down”. When an agent says it wants to survive there is “no-one at home”. Each role-played character would carry its own theory of selfhood, which the conversation narrows; what an agent would try to preserve (hardware, process, instance) is left open. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-370), in the Nature text with the arXiv v1 preprint compared; worth reading here as the source of the simulator/simulacra account that every LLM-selfhood paper in this record answers. On it nothing is a self: the simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency “of its own, not even simulated versions”, and a simulacrum only role-plays a character that has them (“no-one at home”). Its one section on selfhood asks which self a role-played character would try to preserve, not what the system is, and leaves identity over time for a dialogue agent “far from clear”. The denial of a self is asserted from the framing, not argued against a rival. |
| LIT-463 v2 | Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective | Zahavi (2005), MIT Press. Per its publisher, a defence of the self against neuroscientists and philosophers who doubt it, arguing that “the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness” and that experience, self-awareness and selfhood cannot be understood apart. It uses Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to give an account of the “experiential givenness of the self” for philosophy of mind, cognitive science, developmental psychology and psychiatry. Its chapters run from self-awareness and phenomenal consciousness through time-consciousness and reflection to self and other, theory of mind, autism and embodiment. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access (Crossref carries no licence, OpenAlex reports it closed), and no author copy of the book is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-465 | Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | Shanahan (2024), Inquiry 69(6):2982–3010, from arXiv:2402.12422. After Wittgenstein, consciousness words mean only what is public, so the question for an exotic entity is whether we could “engineer an encounter” with it in a shared world and what a society-wide conversation would then say. Disembodied chat agents are not even candidates; virtually embodied LLM agents could be. Tool use and memory make belief talk increasingly literal, but a chat agent has no “self worth preserving”, and a role player has no “person behind the mask”: its identity is a shifting distribution of roles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-382) in the arXiv v2 preprint (July 2024), not the Inquiry version of record, which returned 403; worth reading as the Wittgensteinian alternative to the evidential debate about AI consciousness. It replaces “is it conscious?” with “could we engineer an encounter with it, and how would our language adapt?”, and so counts disembodied chat agents as not even candidates. On the self it is brief and pointed: a chat agent has “nothing that would qualify as a self worth preserving”, lacking body, personal history and autobiographical memory, and a role-playing agent has no “person behind the mask”; its identity, “insofar as that notion even made sense”, is the shifting distribution of roles. It argues by method and scenario, not evidence, and says so. |
| LIT-466 | Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | Shanahan (2025), arXiv:2503.16348. Asks whether consciousness talk can be stretched to disembodied, 2024-vintage LLM agents. Their time would be discrete and discontinuous, a string of unlike beads. Their “I” has two palatable referents, the model across conversations and a self confined to one conversation that “flickers into being with each user interaction”, and we may slip between them. Such selves can be edited, copied and merged, and smeared across branching simulacra. Every candidate site dissolves, which Shanahan reads as Buddhist emptiness, and turns back on human selfhood. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-376) in arXiv v3 (July 2025), the only text there is; worth reading as the one paper here that argues directly about what an LLM’s self is, rather than whether it has one. Its answer: two conceptions are in play, a self sited in the model and “fleeting, flickering” selves sited in single conversations, and we may slip between them; every candidate site “dissolves upon close examination”, and Shanahan takes that to the Buddhist conclusion that there is no inherent self, here or in us. It is avowedly “poetic”, not literal, and its examples are invented usages, not data. |
| LIT-467 v3 | Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity | Metzinger (2003), MIT Press. Per its publisher, “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves”, and the phenomenal self is “the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”. A representationalist and functional analysis of the conscious first-person perspective, with conceptual “tools”, constraints on consciousness and neurophenomenological case studies (agnosia, neglect, blindsight, hallucination), asking whether being someone can be analysed at subpersonal levels. Unread: registered from the description and the contents; the theory is read in LIT-450. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access and no author copy is posted. Its theory is read in Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450, read in full), and more fully in his “Précis: Being No One” (PSYCHE 11(5), 2005; LIT-568, read in full 2026-10-03), the read substitute for the book, which sets out six of its ten constraints and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex still reports it closed with no open location; it is not in the Internet Archive’s MIT Press open-access collection, which holds Metzinger’s 2024 book (LIT-1943); MIT Press Direct returned a Cloudflare challenge; no author copy found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-468 v2 | The Constitution of Selves | Schechtman (1996), Cornell University Press. Separates the reidentification question (is this the same person?) from the characterization question (which actions, experiences and traits are this person’s own?), and argues against analytic philosophy’s attention to the first at the expense of the second. Chapters 1–3 take up reidentification; chapters 4–6 give the narrative self-constitution view, on which, as Strawson quotes it, a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative”. The source of the term “characterization question” in the SEP map. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Cornell/De Gruyter eBook is sold, not open, and the Internet Archive copy is for print-disabled users only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-491 v2 | Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories | Ásta (2018), OUP. Per its publisher, a theory of social categories built on the question “what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful?”; its main idea is that “social categories are conferred upon people”, and its “conferralist” framework is applied to sex, gender, race, disability and other categories, and to their tendency to oppress. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is not open access, Oxford Academic is paywalled, and the author’s site posts replies and related essays but no chapters or drafts), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length statement of conferralism, the main rival to Haslanger’s account of social categories (LIT-480); what it argues beyond the description is not recorded here. |
| LIT-541 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, McHugh & Hayes (2004), International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy 4(2):355–375. RFT stated briefly: humans relate events bidirectionally and arbitrarily, as a generalized operant under contextual control, so words take on the functions of what they are related to. Frames combine into networks, networks are related to networks (metaphor), rules are networks that regulate behaviour, and the self is content, process and context of verbal relations. Psychopathology is read as verbal behaviour, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT interpretations. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-430), in place of the RFT book, LIT-549; worth reading as a short statement of Relational Frame Theory by two of the book’s editors, and as the paper that shows how RFT is meant to become a theory of psychopathology. Humans, unlike the animals of conditioning research, relate events bidirectionally, so a word acquires the functions of what it names. Relating is a generalized operant learned across exemplars, and its frames share mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment and the transformation of function. Rules are relational networks, and the self is three verbal relations to one’s own behaviour. ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are then reinterpreted in those terms. Its clinical examples are illustrations, not data, and it says its Part 3 is “no more than a heuristic”. |
| LIT-549 v2 | Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition | Hayes, Barnes-Holmes & Roche (eds.), Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001. The founding book of Relational Frame Theory: human language and cognition are learned, generalized operant behaviour, the arbitrarily applicable relating of events (mutually, in combination, and with transformation of their functions) under contextual control. Eight chapters state the theory, from derived relations to rules and the self; five apply it to development, education, social processes, psychopathology and religion. Unread: registered from Crossref’s chapter records, with LIT-541 read in its place. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref’s book and chapter records, not read; LIT-541, a 21-page statement of the same theory by two of its editors, was read in its place. No lawful full text of the book was found. Springer’s book page returned a “Client Challenge” bot page, Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy, and Maynooth University’s repository (where Barnes-Holmes and Roche deposited many RFT papers) holds no chapter of it. A copy on an Ethiopian national-library server was not used, because it is not an author, institutional or publisher deposit. The editors’ own fourteen-page chapter 8, “Relational Frame Theory: A Précis” (pp. 141–154, DOI 10.1007/0-306-47638-x_8), is the part a human reader should take first; a reading of the whole book would move this to Active. |
| LIT-555 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda & Lillis (2006), Behaviour Research and Therapy 44(1):1–25. The ACT model: psychopathology is psychological inflexibility, produced when language (cognitive fusion) and experiential avoidance dominate direct contingencies, and ACT restores flexibility through six processes. A review of correlational, component, mediational and outcome studies finds the model “broadly supportive” but the literature immature, and the evidence suggests ACT works through different processes from traditional CBT. Read in an early author manuscript whose numbers differ from the published paper’s. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-431), but in an early manuscript, not the published text; worth reading as the canonical statement of the ACT model of psychopathology, “psychological inflexibility”, and of the six processes ACT targets. Cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance (from LIT-551) narrow behaviour, and acceptance, defusion, present-moment contact, self as context, values and committed action restore flexibility. The copy read is an author manuscript in Georgia State University’s repository that still carries “xx” placeholders, and its numbers differ from the published paper’s as Kashdan and Rottenberg report them (21 studies against 32; an AAQ correlation printed “.030” against “.42”). Use its model and argument, not its numbers. Its own verdict on the evidence is “broadly supportive” but “not mature”. |
| LIT-558 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Deci & Ryan (2000), Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227–268, target article. SDT’s case for innate psychological needs, for competence, relatedness and autonomy, defined as nutriments for growth, integrity and well-being and identified functionally, against Hull’s drives and Murray’s acquired needs. The “why” of a goal (autonomous or controlled regulation) and its “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic aspiration) each predict well-being, because each affects need satisfaction. Thwarted needs yield substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns. SDT grounds autonomy in the organism’s tendency to self-organize, argued to be an evolved advantage. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-439), from the authors’ own deposit of the published target article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the full statement of what SDT means by a “need” and why it posits three. Needs are “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 228), identified by what follows when they are satisfied or thwarted, not by how strongly people want them. Goals differ in their “why” (autonomous or controlled regulation) and their “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic content), and both matter because of need satisfaction. Thwarting produces need substitutes, controlled regulatory styles and rigid behaviour patterns. It is a target article: the commentaries and the authors’ reply in the same issue were not read. |
| LIT-559 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | Ryan & Deci (2000), American Psychologist 55(1):68–78. Self-determination theory in eleven pages. Three innate psychological needs, for competence, autonomy and relatedness, must be satisfied for growth, integration and well-being; their thwarting is “a principal source of human distress” (p. 74). Motivation differs in kind, not only amount: extrinsic motivation runs from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation, and becomes more autonomous as a regulation is internalized and integrated with the self. Autonomy is volition, not independence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-442), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the shortest statement of self-determination theory by its authors, and the one most cited. It gives the three basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness), the continuum of regulation from amotivation through external, introjected, identified and integrated regulation to intrinsic motivation, and the claim that autonomy is volition, “not … being independent, detached, or selfish” (p. 74). It is a review: every empirical claim is cited to other papers, nothing is tested here, and it states the reward-undermining result as settled by Deci, Koestner & Ryan (LIT-557), which Cameron, Banko & Pierce dispute (LIT-562, unread; by its abstract). |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-572 v2 | Narrative Identity | McAdams & McLean (2013), Current Directions in Psychological Science 22(3):233–238. Per its abstract, narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose”. Narrators who find redemptive meanings in adversity and whose stories feature agency and exploration “tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity”. Unread: registered from the abstract; the construct is read in LIT-595. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref record and its abstract, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. SAGE does not make it open, Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it closed with no repository copy, Kate McLean’s publications page lists it without a file, the APS journal page offers no PDF, and ResearchGate refused this session (403). Its definition and its role are read first-hand in McAdams’s 2019 essay (LIT-595, read in full), which quotes the definition and builds on it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for narrative identity in psychology. A human reader with SAGE access could read its six pages and move it to Active. |
| LIT-574 v2 | A Multicomponent Conceptualization of Authenticity: Theory and Research | Kernis & Goldman (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38:283–357. Unread. As two read papers report it: authenticity is “the unimpeded operation of one’s true self in one’s daily enterprise”, it is measured by the 45-item Authenticity Inventory (AI-3), and dispositional authenticity correlates with self-esteem (r = .47), self-concept clarity and self-actualization and negatively with distress. It is commonly summarized as four components: awareness, unbiased processing, behaviour and relational orientation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref record and from two read papers that report it, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Elsevier (ScienceDirect), Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list it as closed, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to ResearchGate and academia.edu, neither an author or institutional deposit that could be reached (ResearchGate refuses automated requests). Michael Kernis died in 2009, so no author page holds it. It is a 75-page chapter; a human reader with library access to Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 can read it, and that would move this to Active. |
| LIT-579 | Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model | Schwartz (undated, c. 2000s; IFS Institute). IFS views a person as “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, each wanting a valuable role but forced into extreme ones by experience: managers keep control, exiles carry pain, and firefighters douse exiles’ feelings by bingeing or numbing. Everyone has a Self that appears when parts “step back”, and is not a passive witness but an active leader and healer. Its qualities are the “eight Cs”. The goal is to differentiate the Self from the parts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-453); worth reading as Richard Schwartz’s own short statement of the IFS model, freely published by the IFS Institute, and the read substitute (with chapter 1 of the book, NOTE-457) for Internal Family Systems Therapy (LIT-591). IFS is “a new synthesis of two already-existing paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind”. A person contains “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, forced into extreme roles (managers, firefighters, exiles) by experience. Everyone has a Self with “crucial leadership qualities”, summed up as eight Cs: calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage and connectedness. A practitioner’s essay: the evidence is clinical experience and one case. |
| LIT-583 v2 | Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2001), Cambridge University Press. The book-length statement of picoeconomics: hyperbolic discounting makes a person a population of bargaining interests, and will is the recursive bundling of choices into precedents. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the précis, LIT-586, which stands in for it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the publisher’s description and from the outline of the book given in its précis, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and no author deposit of the book was found (the author’s site, picoeconomics.org, carries the précis and articles, not the book). The owner suggested the précis instead, and it is read and filed as LIT-586 (NOTE-443), which follows the book’s three sections and twelve chapters. The book is kept as the citation others reach for. A human with library access could read chapters 5-8 (the bargaining model and its evidence) against the précis. |
| LIT-586 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2005), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5), the précis of Breakdown of Will (2001). People and other animals discount delayed rewards hyperbolically, so preferences reverse as a smaller, sooner reward comes near, and a person becomes a population of reward-seeking “interests” that must forestall one another. Willpower is the bundling of future choices by treating the present one as a precedent: an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma, not an organ or a top-down ego. The same recursion predicts the will’s costs: legalism, circumscribed “lapse districts”, motivated blindness to lapses, and rules that favour countable goals over subtle ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-443), as the substitute for the 2001 book (LIT-583), which the owner suggested and which the précis follows chapter by chapter. Worth reading as the shortest complete statement of picoeconomics in Ainslie’s own words. Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse as a smaller, sooner reward draws near, so a person behaves like a population of “interests” that bargain across time. Will is not a faculty above them but a recursive self-prediction: treating each choice as a precedent “bundles” future rewards, an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which “credibility is power”. The same mechanism predicts the will’s side effects: legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control. |
| LIT-591 v2 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Schwartz & Sweezy (2019/2020), Guilford, 2nd ed., the authoritative text of Internal Family Systems therapy. IFS synthesises “the plural mind, or the idea that we all contain many different parts, and systems thinking”. Extreme parts are protectors or burdened exiles, not pathology, and everyone has a Self that can lead the inner system once parts “step back”. Therapy restores trust in the Self’s leadership and unburdens exiles. Chapter 1 read; the rest unread. | Unavailable — chapter 1 read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-457, Skimmed), from the sample chapter Guilford posts; the other nineteen chapters unread. No lawful full text could be reached: the book is sold by Guilford, the Internet Archive’s scans are of the 1995 first edition and access-restricted, and Schwartz’s 2013 Journal of Clinical Psychology article and the 2023 Family Process article (Brenner, Schwartz & Becker) are closed, the latter’s author share-link behind a Cloudflare challenge. Chapter 1 gives the model’s origin and its eight “essentials”, and the IFS Institute’s “Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model” (LIT-579, read in full) gives Schwartz’s short statement of parts, roles and the Self. Filed because it is the canonical text of IFS. A reading of chapters 2–4 (systems, the Self, burdens) and 19 (research) would place it. |
| LIT-592 v2 | The Authentic Personality: A Theoretical and Empirical Conceptualization and the Development of the Authenticity Scale | Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis & Joseph (2008), Journal of Counseling Psychology 55(3):385–399. Unread. Per its abstract it builds the 12-item Authenticity Scale on a tripartite, person-centred conception (self-alienation, authentic living, accepting external influence), supported by exploratory and multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, with discriminant validity from the Big Five, nonsignificant correlations with social desirability, test–retest r = .78 to .91, and strong relations of every subscale to self-esteem and well-being. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the abstract on the University of Manchester research portal and the repository records, not read. Every lawful copy found is out of reach: Manchester’s portal lists a pre-peer-review manuscript (PRE-PEER-REVIEW.PDF, 143 KB) whose download is behind a JavaScript and cookie challenge, which I did not try to get past; Stirling’s STORRE holds the published version under a permanent embargo (“The publisher does not allow this work to be made publicly available”); Warwick’s WRAP and Lincoln’s repository records carry no file; ResearchGate refused the request. A human reader can open the Manchester manuscript in a browser, or ask an author for a copy through STORRE; either would move this to Active. |
| LIT-594 v2 | The Ethics of Authenticity | Taylor (1991), Harvard University Press, 142 pp.; first published in Canada the same year by Anansi as The Malaise of Modernity, an extended version of the 1991 CBC Massey Lectures. Unread. As commonly summarized (no publisher’s description was reachable), it argues that the modern ideal of authenticity, being true to oneself, is a genuine moral ideal rather than mere narcissism or relativism, and that it is degraded when it is cut off from shared “horizons of significance” and from the dialogical way identities are formed. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from catalogue records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is in print with Harvard University Press, the Internet Archive copy (ethicsofauthenti00tayl, the 1992 printing) is an access-restricted lending copy, the publisher’s digital edition at De Gruyter returned an empty bot-check response, and the full-text copies a web search turns up are file-sharing uploads, which were not opened. No shorter, lawfully readable work by Taylor stating the same argument was found to read in its place (see Standing in the record). The book is about 140 pages, so a human reader with a library copy can read it in an afternoon; that reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-595 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams (2019), Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 3(1):1–18. Narrative identity is “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, giving a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. Storytelling evolved with human hypersociality. The self develops from social actor (by age 2) to motivated agent (school years) to autobiographical author (adolescence). Agentic and redemptive stories go with well-being and generativity, and cultures supply master narratives. “Biology guides and culture fills in the details.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-470), as the read substitute for McAdams & McLean, “Narrative Identity” (2013; LIT-572), which has no lawful copy and whose definition this essay takes over word for word. Worth reading as McAdams’s own short statement of narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It places the life story as the third layer of a self that develops from actor to agent to author, and reports that story features (agency, redemption, coherence) predict well-being and generativity. A review essay: the empirical claims are cited, not shown, and the evolutionary story is offered as plausible, not tested. |
| LIT-606 | Thine Own Self: True Self-Concept Accessibility and Meaning in Life | Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt & King (2009), JPSP 96(2):473–490. Five studies: faster “me” judgments for one’s own true-self traits (residualized on speed for control traits) predict presence of meaning in life, while actual-self accessibility does not, controlling affect, need satisfaction and (Study 4) AI-3 authenticity, which was itself uncorrelated with true-self accessibility. Subliminal priming of true-self traits raised reported meaning (Studies 3 and 5), for disliked traits as much as liked ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-469); worth reading as the experimental case that the true self-concept, as distinct from self-reported authenticity, matters to felt meaning. In five student studies (N = 56 to 149), how quickly people classify their own “true self” traits predicts presence of meaning in life over and above actual-self accessibility, need satisfaction and AI-3 authenticity, and subliminally priming true-self traits raises reported meaning, even when the traits are disliked. Effects are small, meaning is self-report only, and the Study 5 interaction is printed with an F that cannot carry its stated p. |
| LIT-626 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | Newen & Montemayor (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240314. The ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience and three functions. Basic arousal, realisable without cortex, alarms the body when a homeostatic variable leaves its tolerance range, overriding slow regulation with no choice involved; it adds lasting care for the injury and one-shot, generalised avoidance learning. General alertness, cortical and attention-guided, enables flexible learning and decision-making. Reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content, not a third kind of experience, and enables long-term planning that accounts for one’s own and others’ mindsets. IIT, higher-order theories and GNWT are faulted for tying consciousness to neocortex and leaving basic arousal out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-489); worth reading as the shortest statement of the ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience, basic arousal (subcortical, an alarm that overrides slow homeostatic regulation) and general alertness (cortical, attention-guided, for flexible learning and choice), plus reflexive self-consciousness, which is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content and its own function, long-term planning. Its evidence is a short list of cited findings (hydranencephaly, decorticate cats, central lateral thalamus stimulation in macaques), and the functional claims are argued, not tested. |
| LIT-628 | Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2022), Brain 145(7):2231–2235, an Essay. Consciousness occurs when mind contents are spontaneously identified as belonging to their organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings (hunger, pain, well-being, plain feelings of existence) supplies that identification and “lends” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid: interoceptive pathways are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and unprotected by a blood–brain barrier, so the body and its neural map interact directly. Posterior brainstem lesions abolish consciousness where large cortical ones may not; consciousness needs “a partnership of nervous systems with the bodies they serve”. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-03 (NOTE-507): every section was covered, but through a fetch tool that returned section-by-section accounts with short quotes, not a verbatim copy, so the quotes are unchecked; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Damasios’ claim that consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, supplied by a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings, which are hybrid: in interoception the map and the body it maps interact and “commingle”. It is a five-page Essay with no data. Its evidence is clinical and cited (brainstem coma versus cortical lesions, general anaesthesia), and its mechanism is the cellular contrast in Table 1: unmyelinated, non-synaptic, barrier-free interoceptive pathways. |
| LIT-650 | Conscious birds | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240308. A review arguing that birds show sensory awareness (bistable perception in pigeons; crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that follow the reported percept, not the stimulus) and graded self-awareness (magpie and house crow mark tests; pigeons and roosters that treat their mirror image as not-a-conspecific while failing the mark test). Checked against three theories, the avian brain meets the anatomical and physiological requirements of the global neuronal workspace (a hub-and-module connectome with NCL as hub) and of recurrent processing, while IIT’s have not been tested (no PCI, no grid-like lattice found). The authors say the evidence does not yet allow a strong conclusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-488); worth reading as a short, current statement of the case for consciousness in birds and of what each of three theories (global neuronal workspace, recurrent processing, IIT) would need to find in an avian brain. Its strongest evidence is second-hand: crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that track the reported percept rather than the stimulus (Nieder et al. 2020). Its sharpest argument is that the bird’s prefrontal analogue is nuclear, not laminar, so conscious report does not need cortical layering. The authors say the findings “do not allow for a strong conclusion”. |
| LIT-697 v2 | The feeling of being a group: Corporate emotions and collective consciousness | Schmid (2014), in von Scheve & Salmela (eds.), Collective Emotions (OUP), pp. 3–16. Unread. By summaries of its abstract: against the view that groups cannot have emotions because they lack consciousness, it argues that a group with proper intentional attitudes has consciousness, as plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and so meets a precondition for emotion. Groups probably cannot have “fast” emotions but can have “slow” ones such as confidence, happiness or grief. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The chapter is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the University of Vienna’s research portal refused the request; the author’s preprint is posted only on ResearchGate and academia.edu, which this record does not use. What is said of it comes from summaries of its abstract returned by a search service, labelled unverified. A person could supply the chapter from the OUP volume or ask the author; a reading would move this to Active and should test whether its “corporate emotions” are corporate attitudes in List’s sense. |
| LIT-747 | Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise | Wolf (2015), Inquiry 58(2):127–142, the 2013 Routledge Lecture. The causal/moral contrast runs together two distinctions, shallow vs deep and moral vs nonmoral; we are deeply responsible for nonmoral traits and art too. Attributability and accountability are independent, not levels: accountability needs only wrongdoing, a position to know it, and its being up to the agent. The fit target of reactive attitudes is, tentatively, an “intelligent” self. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-565): in full, from the author’s typescript of the 2013 Routledge Lecture in Cambridge’s Apollo repository. Worth reading as the only lawful full text by Wolf on responsibility the record holds. It argues that deep responsibility is not limited to the moral, and that attributability and accountability are independent, not two levels. Accountability may need nothing metaphysically robust. What makes a self a fit target of the reactive attitudes is, on her “hunch”, that it is an “intelligent” self. Limits: the positive view is offered as a hunch, the psychopath is a stipulated case, and the lecture does not restate the Reason View of Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685). |
| LIT-1001 v2 | Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics | danah boyd (2008), PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. An ethnography of American teenagers on MySpace and Facebook. Networked publics have four properties (persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability) and three dynamics: invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private. Collapsed contexts make it hard to keep distinct social contexts distinct. The analysis of self-presentation builds on Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985). | Active — read in part 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1432, Skimmed) from the author’s copy at danah.org (www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf), licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Appendix 3): Chapter 1 on networked publics, Chapter 4 on self-presentation and context, and Chapter 7 in full, with the passages on collapse elsewhere; Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 were not read in full. This extends the reading of 2026-10-12 (NOTE-710). Worth reading for its account of collapsed contexts: distinct social contexts are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and networked media remove them, so audiences a person keeps apart are brought together, often without the person seeing it. Its examples, after Meyrowitz (1985), show contradictory self-presentations doing no harm while the audiences stay segmented, and trouble when they meet. Read it knowing that the evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict between segmented and collapsed audiences, and that the teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation misread by an unintended audience. |
| LIT-1227 v2 | The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity | Pradeu (2012). The immunological theory that an individual is defined by self and nonself fails, since immune responses to self and tolerance of foreign entities are the rule; Pradeu proposes a criterion of immunogenicity by discontinuity, and from it an immunological account of biological individuality. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed. The HAL record it lists, hal-01343696, is a notice with no file deposited (HAL API, 2026-10-29); its other location is an institutional e-book handle that needs a licence. Oxford Academic offers it only to subscribers, and web searches found reviews, paid e-books and Pradeu’s earlier papers, not the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1262 v2 | The free-energy self: A predictive coding account of self-recognition | Apps & Tsakiris (2014; online 2013), Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 41:85–97. Self-recognition is recast under the free-energy principle: one’s own body is “the most likely to be ‘me’”, represented as a high-level, multimodal empirical prior learned from correlations between vision, touch, proprioception, corollary discharge and interoception, and “the notion that there is a ‘self’ is the most parsimonious and accurate explanation for sensory inputs”. The rubber hand, enfacement and rubber-voice illusions become one effect: synchronous stimulation leaves surprise that multimodal areas explain away by raising the probability that the other hand, face or voice is “me” and lowering it for one’s own. Context (a non-corporeal object, a misplaced hand, culture) acts as a prior. Three anatomical predictions are drawn: no unimodal area is self-specific; multimodal areas (TPJ, anterior insula, IPS, IFG) are engaged but not self-specific; predicted self-stimuli suppress activity. The authors concede there is “little direct evidence” for the account. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-991) in full; worth reading as the first statement of the predictive-processing account of self-recognition and body ownership: one’s own face, voice and body are recognised as “me” because a high-level, multimodal prior makes them the most probable cause of correlated input across the senses, and the rubber hand, enfacement and “rubber voice” illusions are that prior being updated when synchronous multisensory stimulation leaves surprise to explain away. Read it as a theoretical review that, by its authors’ own account, rests on evidence that “neither largely supports nor refutes” it: no data, no model, no simulation, and predictions they call hard to falsify with standard fMRI. |
| LIT-1263 v2 | Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | Seth (2013), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):565–573, an Opinion article. Emotions are “interoceptive inference”: felt states are the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, compared with bottom-up prediction errors in the anterior insula. Prediction errors are also cancelled by action, as descending predictions set the reference points of autonomic reflexes, the visceral counterpart of active inference in motor control. The same scheme is applied to the experience of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion is a revision of the multisensory self-model under precision-weighted error. Low interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to it, and a virtual hand pulsing in time with the heartbeat is owned more. No direct test of the model is claimed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1000); worth reading as the short statement that put emotion and body ownership under one predictive-coding mechanism: felt emotion is the content of top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, the anterior insula is the comparator, and the experience of body ownership is what the brain infers to be “most likely to be me” from interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. It is an opinion article with no new data. Its evidence is indirect and cited, and its one figure is a study by the author’s own group, an augmented-reality rubber hand illusion whose virtual hand flashed in or out of time with the heartbeat. The record’s bridge from its interoception cluster to body ownership. |
| LIT-1264 | No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Ehrsson, Fotopoulou, Radziun, Longo & Tsakiris (2022), Nat Commun 13:564, a Matters Arising on Lush et al. (2020). Reanalysing the open data of all 353 participants, they find no relationship between hypnotisability and the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7) or in proprioceptive drift (rho = 0.047, BF01 = 1.7), a significant synchrony effect in every hypnotisability quartile, and no effect of explicit suggestions about which condition should work. The correlations Lush et al. report hold as much for the asynchronous condition and for an “impossible” visual hallucination item, so they read hypnotisability as a general influence on report, not a driver of the illusion. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-997) in full with its supplementary figure; worth reading as the case for the rubber hand illusion surviving trait suggestibility, made from Lush et al.’s own open data (n = 353): the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings does not vary with hypnotisability (Bayes factor 5.7 for the null), is significant in every quartile of it including the least suggestible, and is unmoved by explicit instructions about which condition should work. Read it as a reanalysis and an argument, not new data: it treats the asynchronous condition as a valid control, which is exactly what the reply (Lush & Seth 2022) disputes, and its drift analysis is inconclusive by its own Bayes factor. |
| LIT-1265 | Windows to the soul: Children and adults see the eyes as the location of the self | Starmans & Bloom (2012), Cognition 123(2):313–318. Three experiments with 4- and 5-year-olds (41–50 per study) and US adults on Mechanical Turk (51–53 per study) asked which of two pictured flies or snowflakes was “closer to” a cartoon character. Both groups chose positions near the eyes: over the lower body on a girl; at the chest on an alien whose eyes were there; and in front of the eyes over behind the head, or in front of the feet, on a profile. The authors conclude that people intuitively think of the self as located at or near the eyes, and, since preschoolers share it, that this is not learned from ideas about the brain. The judgement is about another, drawn person, and the step from “closer to her” to “the location of the self” is assumed, not tested. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-995), from the published article on the authors’ lab site at Yale; worth reading as the best-known folk-judgement study of where a person is in their body, and for what such a study can and cannot show. Preschoolers and adults on Mechanical Turk chose which of two pictures had a fly, or a snowflake, closer to a cartoon character. They chose positions near the eyes: on a girl, near the eyes over the body; on an alien with its eyes on its chest, near the chest-eyes; on a profile, in front of the eyes over behind the head and over places the character could see. The authors conclude that children and adults intuitively place the self at or near the eyes. Read it as a judgement about where another, drawn, person is, with small samples, some slips in the statistics and an inference from “closer to Mary” to “the location of the self” that the design assumes. It bears on none of the rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1266 | Where exactly am I? Self-location judgements distribute between head and torso | Alsmith & Longo (2014), Consciousness and Cognition 24:70–74. Ten adults set a pointer, rotating in their sagittal plane, to point “directly at you”, by hand while blindfolded or by telling the experimenter when to stop it. Responses clustered on the upper face and the upper torso, and the starting position of the pointer decided which: from above, the face; from below, the torso. Vision and touch gave the same pattern. The authors conclude that the self is judged neither spread over the body nor at one point, and that the concept of the self as a spatial entity is “inherently ambiguous”. Small sample, 20.7% of trials lost, and a reanalysis whose key effect is misreported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1008), from the published article on the second author’s lab site; worth reading as the first study that asks people to point at themselves on their own body, rather than on a drawing or a cartoon, and as a measure of self-location that is neither a questionnaire nor a walking-back drift. Ten adults, standing, set a pointer rotating in front of them so that it pointed “directly at you”, blindfolded by hand or by telling the experimenter when to stop it. Answers fell mostly on two regions, the upper face and the upper torso, and which one depended on where the pointer started: from above, the face; from below, the torso. Seeing and touching gave the same pattern, the touch version less sharply. Read it as a small pilot with a fifth of its trials lost to a camera fault, whose re-analysis without the lower torso misreports a non-significant effect as significant, and whose result may reflect where the pointer reached first as much as where people feel they are. It bears on THEORY-768’s self-location dimension; it bears on none of the rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1267 | Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Lush & Seth (2022), Nat Commun 13:563, replying to Ehrsson et al. (2022). They accept the reanalyses and dispute the reading: an asynchronous condition is no control for demand characteristics, because expectancies are higher for the synchronous condition, and in their sample the expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07). Highly hypnotisable participants may meet those expectancies by generating the experience, less hypnotisable ones by response bias. Agreement with “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand” rose with hypnotisability (b = 0.76, rs = 0.27) and averaged 0.7 on a seven-point scale whose maximum is 3. Whether multisensory integration plays a significant role in RHI measures awaits experiments with adequate controls. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1003) in full; worth reading as the clearest short statement of why a synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference cannot by itself show that the rubber hand illusion is multisensory: participants expect more from the synchronous condition, and in Lush et al.’s sample (n = 353) that expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability, so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict too. It adds that agreement with the ownership item rises steeply with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Read it as a reply: the expectancy and ownership regressions are post hoc, as the authors grant of both sides, and its alternative for low-suggestible participants, response bias, is asserted and not measured. |
| LIT-1268 | No causal link between changes in hand position sense and feeling of limb ownership in the rubber hand illusion | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson (2016; online 2015), Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78:707–720. During 90 s of synchronous or asynchronous brushing, a motor moved the participant’s hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand at 0.9 mm/s, below the threshold for feeling the movement. Pointing to the hand followed the displacement (drift main effect η² .68 in Experiment 1), but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and did not differ between toward, away or a static hand (n = 18 in each of two experiments). The static condition reproduced the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion (r = .56). The authors conclude that changing hand position sense does not change ownership, so drift is not a cause of the illusion; whether ownership causes drift is left open. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-992) in full; worth reading as the direct test of whether a change in felt hand position causes the feeling of owning the rubber hand. A motor slid the hidden real hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during stroking, too slowly to notice; pointing moved with it by about 5–6 cm, and questionnaire ownership did not change, in two experiments of 18. The authors conclude that drift is not a prerequisite of the illusion and is a process distinct from ownership, while still defending drift as a measure when the hand is immobile. Read it as a null result from 18 participants with no equivalence test, within distances (8–24 cm) where the illusion is known to work, and with some statistics that do not agree with their own test values. |
| LIT-1271 | Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes (2020), Nature Communications 11:4853. Trait hypnotisability (the Sussex-Waterloo Scale, SWASH), which the authors call phenomenological control, predicted vicarious pain (n = 404) and mirror touch (n = 154), and, in a rubber hand illusion study of 353, agreement with the ownership and location items after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing, a visual control item, and, weakly, synchronous proprioceptive drift. An attempt to manipulate expectations failed, so the evidence is correlational. The authors conclude that the usual asynchrony and control-item checks do not rule out suggestion, and that the illusion as commonly reported may be at least partly an implicit imaginative-suggestion effect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-990), with its supplementary information and the peer review file; worth reading as the first large-sample test of whether the rubber hand illusion, as it is usually measured, tracks the trait that hypnosis scales measure. In 353 undergraduates, hypnotisability predicted agreement with the ownership items after synchronous brushing (about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), and just as well after asynchronous brushing and for a visual “control” item; it predicted synchronous proprioceptive drift weakly (rs 0.11). In separate samples of 404 and 154 it predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The planned manipulation of expectations failed, so nothing here is causal, and the pre-registered test, hypnotisability against the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference, was inconclusive. Read it as strong evidence that the standard asynchrony and control-item checks do not control for suggestion, and as no evidence on whether the synchrony effect survives such a control. Seth, author of LIT-1263, is a co-author. |
| LIT-1272 | Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion | Hohwy & Paton (2010), PLoS ONE 5:e9416. Through a head-mounted display, a foreign arm (an experimenter’s, then a rubber one) was seen aligned with the participant’s own arm while both were tapped. Synchronous tapping, against asynchronous, raised ratings that the felt touch was produced by the seen finger on the seen arm, and the rating held through pauses of up to a minute (n = 13). After onset, synchrony also raised ratings that a finger hovering 5 cm off the rubber arm caused the touch and that touch was felt on a cardboard box (n = 11 and 10); without prior onset the box gave no synchrony difference (n = 9). The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one comparison only. The authors read the results as the visual body image being “explained away” by ongoing multisensory inference, and as support for one-deficit theories of delusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-998); worth reading as a philosopher’s small rubber hand experiment that pushes the illusion past where it should break, and as the study Apps & Tsakiris cite for cooling of the real hand. Through a head-mounted display the foreign arm was seen exactly where the participant’s own arm lay. Synchronous tapping made people rate the touch as produced on the seen arm (13 people), and after onset they went on to rate touch as caused by a finger hovering 5 cm off a rubber arm, or felt on a cardboard box (10 and 11 people); some described the hovering finger as magnetism, ESP or black magic. Nine people shown the box without prior onset gave no synchrony difference. The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one of four comparisons, by what reads as a one-tailed test. Read it as four small samples, single leading questions with no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a temperature result too weak to carry the claim that the real hand loses ownership. |
| LIT-1273 | Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency | Kalckert & Ehrsson (2012), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6:40. A moving rubber hand illusion: the participant taps a hidden index finger linked by a rod to the finger of a wooden model hand in view. Synchronous movement gave ownership (mean 1.63 on −3 to +3) and agency (2.44), and a 1.73 cm drift toward the model, where a ~500 ms asynchrony gave neither (n = 20 and 20). In a 2 × 2 design (n = 32 each), passive movement abolished agency (−0.61) but left ownership (1.57) and drift, and a model hand rotated 180° abolished ownership (−0.62) and drift but left agency (2.2): a double dissociation on questionnaires. Agency was higher, and correlated with ownership (r = 0.50), only when the hand was owned. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-993) in full; worth reading as the first experiment to set the sense of ownership and the sense of agency against each other in one rubber hand paradigm. A wooden model hand whose index finger is linked by a rod to the participant’s hidden finger is owned when it moves in time with the real finger, whether the movement is the participant’s own or imposed by the experimenter, and is controlled when the participant moves, whether or not it is owned: passive movement removed agency and left ownership, and rotating the model hand 180° removed ownership and left agency. Read it as 104 participants over four between-group experiments, with named non-parametric tests, means and SDs but no standardised effect sizes, a dissociation shown on questionnaires alone (drift measures ownership only), and no control for what participants expected the conditions to do. It also finds the two not independent: agency was rated higher, and correlated with ownership, only when the hand was owned. |
| LIT-1274 v2 | Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(1):7–13. An opinion piece proposing that research on bodily self-consciousness isolate minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), “the conscious experience of being a self”, defined by three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, spatiotemporal self-location, and a weak (geometrical) first-person perspective, claimed jointly necessary and sufficient. The rubber-hand illusion and somatoparaphrenia alter only partial ownership and so do not touch MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and the full-body illusions of Lenggenhager et al. and Ehrsson (2007) do. Agency is causally enabling for MPS but not constitutive of it. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1002) in full; worth reading as the short programmatic paper that names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest form of the experience of being a self, and splits it into three dimensions: self-identification with the body as a whole, self-location, and a weak, purely geometrical first-person perspective. Its distinctive move is to set partial ownership (the rubber-hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia) apart from global ownership, and to say only the second reaches MPS, so that full-body illusions and neurological out-of-body phenomena, not the rubber hand, are the entry point. Its most quotable thesis is that bodily agency “is a causally enabling, but not a constitutive condition, for phenomenal selfhood”. An opinion piece: no new data, the evidence cited, and the necessity and sufficiency claims asserted. |
| LIT-1275 | What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | Longo, Schüür, Kammers, Tsakiris & Haggard (2008), Cognition 107:978–998. 131 participants rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis gave four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, after asynchrony only. A second analysis split embodiment into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location were positive after synchronous brushing and negative after asynchronous; agency was negative after both. Drift toward the rubber hand was 1.34 cm after synchrony and a non-significant 0.30 cm after asynchrony, and ownership and location each predicted it. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1004) in full, from the published article on the first author’s lab site; worth reading as the first large-sample measurement of what the rubber hand illusion feels like, and as the study that split “embodiment” of a rubber hand into ownership, location and agency. 131 people rated 27 statements after 60 s of synchronous and of asynchronous brushing. A principal components analysis found four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, only after asynchronous brushing. Ownership and location rose above neutral only after synchrony, agency stayed below it, and ownership and location each predicted proprioceptive drift. Read it knowing that the three subcomponents come from a second varimax rotation of ten items dominated by one component, that there is no control for expectation or suggestion, and that every item is about a hand, none about the whole body. |
| LIT-1276 | Demand Characteristics Confound the Rubber Hand Illusion | Lush (2020), Collabra: Psychology 6(1):22. A pre-registered quasi-experiment on the controls of the rubber hand illusion. Twenty undergraduates (after 12 pre-registered exclusions) who had never taken part in it were shown a text and a video of the procedure and rated how far they expected to feel each of Botvinick & Cohen’s three illusion and six control statements, under synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Expectancy was higher for illusion than control statements under synchrony (M 1.7 against 0.0, t(19) = 6.24, d = 1.40) and for synchronous than asynchronous illusion statements (1.7 against 0.4, t(19) = 4.68, d = 1.05), and nine who had never heard of the illusion showed the same. The controls therefore do not match expectations, and the author concludes the illusion “may be, partially or entirely, a suggestion effect”; he proposes controls matched on expectancy and on suggestion difficulty. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1005) from the author’s final manuscript on PsyArXiv; worth reading as the direct test of the assumption behind every standard check on the rubber hand illusion, that expectations are matched between the “illusion” and “control” statements and between synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Twenty people who never underwent the illusion read a description of it, watched a 62-second video and rated, for each of Botvinick & Cohen’s nine statements, how far they expected to feel it. They expected the illusion statements more than the control statements under synchrony (1.7 against 0.0, d = 1.40) and the illusion statements more under synchrony than asynchrony (1.7 against 0.4, d = 1.05): the pattern published reports show. Read it as showing that the usual controls cannot rule out suggestion, not as showing that the illusion is suggestion; the author says so. Small, pre-registered, sequential Bayesian stopping, one online sample of undergraduates, and no illusion or drift measured. |
| LIT-1277 v4 | Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), Nature 391:756. Ten subjects watched a rubber left hand being brushed in synchrony with their own hidden left hand. After ten minutes they affirmed feeling the touch where they saw the rubber hand touched, that the touch was caused by the brush on the rubber hand, and that the rubber hand was theirs. After a 30-minute exposure, blind reaches toward the real hand were displaced toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported, and an asynchronously brushed control group reported the illusion for 7% of the time against 42% and showed no drift toward it. The authors conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1006) in full; worth reading as the one-page report that founded the rubber hand illusion paradigm: synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand makes touch be felt where the rubber hand is touched and the rubber hand be felt as one’s own, and after 30 minutes the felt position of the real hand drifts toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, while asynchronous brushing abolishes both. Read it as a brief communication: ten subjects, no stated control-group size, statistics given only as P-values, and a connectionist model and a premotor-cell analogy mentioned but not shown. Its closing claim, that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”, is the sentence the later literature on body ownership builds on. |
| LIT-1279 v2 | Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness | Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger & Blanke (2007), Science 317:1096–1099. A whole-body rubber hand illusion in video virtual reality. Participants saw their own back, filmed from 2 m behind, as a body standing in front of them, stroked in or out of time with strokes on their real back. Under synchronous stroking they rated the seen body as theirs and, after blindfolded displacement, returned to a point shifted toward it (24.1 cm in study I, n = 14). In study II (n = 14) a mannequin gave the same, and a non-bodily object a weaker, non-significant drift with no self-identification. Nobody reported disembodiment or a shifted viewpoint. The authors conclude that self-location and the global ownership they tie to selfhood rest partly on the same visuo-tactile integration as body-part ownership, constrained by knowledge of what a body looks like. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-999), with its supporting online material and the 2008 e-letter exchange; worth reading as the first full-body version of the rubber hand illusion and the experiment the self-model theory cites for global body ownership. Two groups of 14 people saw, through a head-mounted display, a video of a body 2 m in front of them being stroked on the back. When the stroking was synchronous with strokes on their own back, they rated the seen body as theirs and, displaced blindfolded, walked back to a spot about 17 to 25 cm toward it. A mannequin worked; a rectangular object weakened the drift and was not felt as one’s body. Nobody reported leaving the body or seeing from elsewhere, so the authors call it heautoscopy-like, not an out-of-body experience. Read it as two small samples with modest, partly inconsistent effects, and with a rival reading (self-recognition in a video system) that its critics raised and its design does not exclude. |
| LIT-1280 | Serious Problems With Interpreting Rubber Hand “Illusion” Experiments | Roseboom & Lush (2022), Collabra: Psychology 8(1):32274. A resampling study of the synchronous-condition reports of 351 participants from Lush et al. 2020, run as 10,000 simulated experiments of 20 participants each. Unselected samples found mean agreement with the three standard statements significantly above zero in 83% of experiments; samples from above the median of hypnotisability (subjective SWASH) in 99%; from below it in 51%. For the ownership statement alone the lower half gave significant agreement in about 4% of experiments, and the upper half in 74% (supplement). The authors argue that the relationship is not too small to matter, that the synchronous–asynchronous difference cannot be interpreted because of Lush (2020), and that implicit, neuroimaging and animal measures are tied to ownership only through these reports. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1001) from the accepted manuscript on PsyArXiv, with the authors’ analysis notebooks for 10, 20 and 50 participants; worth reading as the clearest demonstration of what a modest correlation between hypnotisability and rubber hand report does to a field of small studies. Resampling the 351 synchronous-condition reports of Lush et al. 2020 in simulated experiments of 20, samples drawn from the upper half of the hypnotisability scale found significant agreement with the three illusion statements 99% of the time and samples from the lower half 51%; for the one ownership statement, “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand”, the figures were 74% and 4%. Read it as a reanalysis of one dataset, with no new data and no asynchronous or drift analysis. Its headline numbers depend on n = 20: at n = 50 the lower half finds the averaged illusion statements in 95% of experiments, though the ownership statement still only in 6%. The authors themselves leave open that the same people may have the illusion for other reasons. |
| LIT-1281 | The Rubber Hand Illusion: Feeling of Ownership and Proprioceptive Drift Do Not Go Hand in Hand | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst (2011), PLoS ONE 6:e21659. Robot arms stroked a rubber hand and the hidden real hand, and felt finger position was probed by a projected dot. Drift toward the rubber hand built up to about 5–6 cm under synchronous stroking, and to the same level when the hand was only seen, unstroked, or when asynchronous stroking was interrupted every 10 s for measurement. Only 120 s of continuous asynchronous stroking held drift near zero (about 1 cm), which reproduces the classic synchronous–asynchronous difference. The questionnaire showed ownership only after synchronous stroking. The authors conclude that drift and ownership come from different integration processes, that asynchrony suppresses drift rather than synchrony causing it, and that drift is not a valid proxy for ownership. Groups were of ten. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1009) in full; worth reading as the study that broke the assumed tie between proprioceptive drift and the feeling of owning the rubber hand. With robot-delivered stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward the rubber hand appeared under synchronous stroking, under no stroking at all (only seeing the hand), and under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s, at levels not significantly different from synchronous stroking (about 5–6 cm); only continuous asynchronous stroking kept it near zero. Ownership, by questionnaire, needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift comes from visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, and that “conclusions about feelings of ownership cannot be drawn from measuring proprioceptive drift alone”. Read it as groups of 10, a visual-judgement measure rather than reaching, and an Experiment 2 whose ownership evidence is anecdotal debriefing, not a questionnaire. |
| LIT-1360 v2 | Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the cognitive construction of the manifest image | Gładziejewski (2025), Synthese 206:225. Dennett’s compression criterion for real patterns is carried through minimum description length, Bayesian inference and variational free energy, so learning a generative model is real-pattern extraction from sensory data. The manifest image is then a structural description of the sensory signal, equally veridical for an envatted twin with matched input. Applied to selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, real as a pattern, not as a substance, and the realism dispute is over criteria. Applied to objects: compression-based composition (Bird 2023) favours cats over arbitrary sums. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1056) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); worth reading as a clear derivation of Dennett’s real patterns into predictive processing, through minimum description length and the complexity–accuracy split of free energy, and as a short diagnosis of the realism dispute about selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, so the self is real as a pattern and not as a substance, and the dispute is over criteria. The structural, Kantian realism it draws (the manifest image is veridical in a matched vat) needs manifest content to be wholly structural, which it assumes. It says nothing about consciousness, and it does not say a self-model exaggerates the self’s unity. |
| LIT-1368 v2 | Prominent and persistent loss of past awareness in amnesia: Delusion, impaired consciousness or coping strategy? | Wilson, Kopelman and Kapur (2008). On Clive Wearing’s repeated claims, in his diary and in speech, that he has just become conscious for the first time, and his denial of earlier awareness when shown evidence of it; the paper weighs whether this is delusion, impaired consciousness or a coping strategy. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability, as far as could be told. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text. OpenAlex lists two repository records: King’s College London’s Pure page (abstract only, no file) and the University of Southampton’s ePrints record 55417, which could not be opened past its bot check, so whether it holds a file is unknown. The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit record has no file. The abstract, read from the King’s College record, confirms the summary. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1369 v2 | Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis | Wilson, Baddeley and Kapur (1995). The case study of the musician Clive Wearing after herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985: very dense anterograde amnesia and extensive retrograde amnesia, with musical performance (playing, sight-reading, conducting) largely preserved. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text, Taylor & Francis offers it only behind a paywall, PubMed (8557808) has the abstract only, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit bibliography lists it without a file, and a web search found no author’s or institutional copy. The abstract, read from PubMed, confirms the dense amnesia but does not mention preserved musical skill, and says the patient’s belief that he has just woken “appears to be the result of a delusion rather than the consequence of his amnesia”. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1379 v2 | Human Nature and the Social Order | Cooley (1902). Argues that society and the individual are two aspects of one life and that the immediate social reality is the idea people have of one another. The self of common speech is a feeling of appropriation attached to ideas formed in communication, and in “a very large and interesting class of cases” it is the “looking-glass self”: an imagined appearance in another mind, an imagined judgement of it, and a self-feeling such as pride or mortification. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1080): five of twelve chapters (I, III, V, VI, VIII) read in full from the Project Gutenberg text of the 1902 edition (public domain); worth reading for the source of the looking-glass self and for how much of the imagined-audience argument it already holds: the other in whose mind one sees oneself is imagined and may be absent, dead or ideal, a group is realized as imagined persons, conformity is driven by a judgement one attributes to others, and opposition to what others enjoin is itself steered by it. The looking-glass self is one large class of the social self, not its definition. An essay from introspection, two children and literature, with no method that could fail. |
| LIT-1394 v2 | The Way I Am | Eminem (2000), from The Marshall Mathers LP. The couplet the record cites, “I am whatever you say I am” and “If I wasn’t then why would I say I am”, is delivered amid complaints about fame, fans and expectations, and reads as defiance, not assent. Its second line is taken from Eric B. & Rakim’s “As the Rhyme Goes On”. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-22, not studied as a text, and on 2026-10-29 not heard. The work is a recording, so a reading of it is a listening. A lawful free copy is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQvteoFiMlg, the official video on the EminemVEVO channel, titled “Eminem - The Way I Am (Clean Version)”, which Wikipedia’s article links and YouTube’s oEmbed confirmed on 2026-10-29. This client cannot listen to audio or watch video, so it is Unfetched (ADR-053). The record holds no licensed lyric text, and lyric pages on unlicensed sites were not used. Listening, to the clean edit or to the album track on a licensed service, would check the couplet CLAIM-415 quotes and the context the summary gives; the clean edit may mute words elsewhere. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1398 v3 | The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy | Merton (1948). Names the self-fulfilling prophecy: a false definition of a situation evokes behaviour that makes the originally false conception come true, and the prophet then cites the course of events as proof that he was right from the beginning. Builds on the Thomas theorem, that situations defined as real are real in their consequences. Applies it to American ethnic and racial prejudice, sets beside it “moral alchemy”, in which the in-group renames the same conduct as virtue in itself and vice in an out-group, and argues that institutional change, not education, breaks the circle. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1409) in full, from a JSTOR download of the article posted on a course wiki (https://entrepreneurscommunicate.pbworks.com/f/Merton.%2BSelf%2BFulfilling%2BProfecy.pdf); worth reading as the essay that names the self-fulfilling prophecy and defines it, and that sets beside it a second route, “moral alchemy”, by which an out-group is condemned whatever it does. Read it knowing that it is a magazine essay on American race relations in 1948, with no references and no sources for its figures, that it sets the self-defeating (“suicidal”) prophecy aside in a footnote, and that two of its three opening examples are forecasts, not false definitions of a present situation. |
| LIT-1410 v3 | Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes | Nisbett & Wilson (1977). Reviews evidence that people may have little or no direct introspective access to higher-order cognitive processes: they can be unaware of a stimulus that influenced a response, of the response, or of the influence. Reports on one’s own processes rest on a priori, implicit causal theories about what plausibly caused what, so they are accurate when the influential stimulus is salient and a plausible cause, and not otherwise. Its test is that observers given only a description of the situation predict the same effects the subjects report. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1412) in full, from a scan of the published article in an MIT course-readings folder (https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Social_Cognition/Nisbett_Wilson_1977_Telling_more_than_we_can_know.pdf); worth reading as the review, with eight small studies of its own, that people’s reports of why they responded as they did miss effective stimuli and credit ineffective ones, and match what observers predict from a description alone, so that they come from causal theories, not from access to the process. Read it knowing that its situations were chosen to produce error, that several of its own studies are reported briefly or unpublished, that it is about the influence of stimuli on responses, not about attributions of agency, and that it shows only that such access as exists does no better than an observer, not that there is none. |
| LIT-1417 v2 | Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task | Johansson, Hall, Sikström & Olsson (2005). 120 participants chose the more attractive of two female faces; on three of 15 trials a card trick handed them the face they had rejected. Only 13% of the 354 swapped trials were detected at the time, at most 26% counting every later form of detection, whatever the faces’ similarity or the time allowed. Reasons given for the rejected face matched reasons for real choices in length, emotionality, specificity and certainty, and some named features only the rejected face had. The authors call this choice blindness. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1398) in full, with its Supporting Online Material, from the authors’ posting of the final published version on the Lund University Cognitive Science site; worth reading as the experiment that catches a person giving reasons for a choice they did not make: 13% of 354 covertly swapped outcomes were noticed at the time, and the reasons given for the swapped face matched reasons for real choices on every measure but one. Read it knowing that it is one low-stakes task (attractiveness of unfamiliar faces), that detection was counted from spontaneous report by design, that the report comparison is a null on eight coded variables, and that it does not show ordinary reasons to be confabulated, which the authors leave open. |
| LIT-1677 | A comparison of minimal group induction procedures | Two small experiments with US undergraduates (N = 42 and 73) compare four ways of making minimal groups. In the classic one, participants are falsely told their painting preferences put them in a group. In the others, they imagine being assigned, are assigned at random, or only memorize five names from one group, with no categorization at all. On explicit liking and identification, and on a bonus-money allocation between two other participants, all four produced comparable in-group favouritism. On IATs of attitude (pleasant/unpleasant) and identification (self/other), only memorization produced large effects; the classic procedure produced none. Implicit and explicit favouritism correlated weakly. Explicit identification correlated with allocation favouritism (r = .37). The allocation result was carried mostly by one of the two colour groups. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1319), in place of LIT-1697, which could not be reached; worth reading as a direct test of how little it takes to make a minimal group. Merely studying a group’s names ties it to “self” on an implicit measure, and imagined or random assignment yields the same explicit favouritism as the classic procedure. Read in place of Tajfel et al. 1971 (LIT-1697, Unavailable); small samples, one college. |
| LIT-1685 | Trauma, prejudice, large-group identity and psychoanalysis | A memorial lecture, not a study. Volkan defines a large group as thousands or millions of people who mostly never meet but share sentiments, and pictures large-group identity as a tent’s canvas worn over each member’s individual identity, with the leader as its pole. Membership in ethnic, national and religious groups begins in childhood, through identification with parents’ investment in the group and the images and “ego tasks” they deposit in the child; after adolescence a core large-group identity cannot be changed. From unofficial dialogues between conflicting groups (1980s to early 2000s), he reports that the central psychological factor in large-group conflict is the need to protect large-group identity, and that a participant who felt that identity threatened would speak with emotion of an injury suffered by ancestors centuries before. The shared image of such an event, “real, fantasized or even mythologized”, undergoes a change of function as it passes down the generations and becomes an identity marker: a chosen trauma. Chosen traumas feed entitlement ideologies and, in a “time collapse”, make the old event feel recent, as Milošević did with Kosovo 1389, with dehumanization and purification following. Recent traumas, the Holocaust among them, are not chosen traumas but undigested ones, bound up with large-group mourning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1250), in place of LIT-1727, which could not be reached; worth reading as Volkan’s late, short restatement of chosen trauma, its trigger in threatened identity and its distinction from the mourning of recent trauma, read in place of his 2001 paper; the evidence is his own clinical and diplomatic observation, without method or measure. |
| LIT-1687 | Two Decades of Terror Management Theory: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Research | Burke, Martens & Faucher (2010). A meta-analysis of experiments testing terror management theory’s mortality salience hypothesis: reminding people of their own death increases defence of their cultural worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem, with a moderate effect across many paradigms and moderators such as delay. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Many Labs 4 (Klein et al. 2022) (LIT-1796) and Chen et al. 2025 (LIT-1730). |
| LIT-1689 | The Concept and Psychological Consequences of Symbolic Immortality | An ANU master’s thesis in psychology testing Otto Rank’s idea that people need to feel they will transcend death, in three modes (children, an afterlife, creative work), to which Lifton added two (nature and experiential transcendence, an expansion of the self). It reviews ethnographic, ancient and modern evidence that all five modes are expressed. Then it surveys 440 Australian adults aged 18 to 88, recruited through Christian, Yoga, Spiritualist and secular groups, using vignettes rated as imagined consolation in terminal illness. Having a mode in one’s life and religious affiliation predict accepting it; education predicts accepting the modes less. The modes predict personality only weakly; Rank’s links to neuroticism and to sex differences fail. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1312), in place of LIT-1714, which could not be reached; worth reading as a review of how Rank’s and Lifton’s modes were measured by 1991, and as one survey showing that the secular modes go with accepting death as final. It is a modest test that found little; skim chapters 1, 4 and 10. |
| LIT-1690 | Group-level emotions | A short review of intergroup emotions theory by its founders. When people self-categorize as group members, the group becomes an aspect of the self and events are appraised for what they mean to the group; the resulting emotions are felt on the group’s behalf. Which emotions are felt shifts with the salient membership; members converge on a group norm for them; they need no personal involvement (guilt for others’ misdeeds); and identification moderates them, the highly identified sometimes reappraising to avoid negative group emotions. Such emotions predict collective action and treatment of out-groups (contempt more than anger predicts extreme violence) and of the in-group, and they can be regulated, which suggests interventions in intractable conflicts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1285), in place of LIT-1722, which could not be reached; worth reading as the founders’ compact statement that an identified-with group is appraised as part of the self, with self-categorization and identification kept apart. |
| LIT-1699 | Pair-Bonding as Inclusion of Other in the Self: A Literature Review | A five-page review, by Aron’s group, of research on the self-expansion model’s principle of inclusion of other in the self (IOS) in long-term romantic relationships. In a close relationship each partner treats the other’s resources, perspectives and identities as to some extent their own (Aron et al. 1991). The single-item IOS circle scale is the standard measure. It tracks feeling and behaving close and correlates with cognitive signs of inclusion, such as slower self-trait judgements where the partner differs and self–partner confusions in memory. Studies since 2013 link greater overlap to self-like treatment of the partner: comparisons, pain and sleep, and honour-based aggression. They also add a two-dimensional model of relational self-change and a perceived-inclusion construct. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1276), in place of LIT-1706, which could not be reached; worth reading as a current map of what the IOS scale is used for and validated against. Its account of Aron et al. 1991 is two sentences. |
| LIT-1702 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | Hershfield (2011). A review, mostly of the author’s own studies, of “future self-continuity”: following Parfit, people who feel their future self is less connected to them treat it more like a stranger and save less for it. Three components are proposed. Similarity, measured by choosing overlapping circles (adapted from Aron et al.’s inclusion-of-other-in-self scale) for one’s self in ten years, predicted patient choices and accumulated assets, controlling for age; neural activity for the future self that looked more like activity for another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47). Vividness: seeing an age-progressed image of oneself raised hypothetical retirement saving. Positivity: respect for the elderly tracked national saving rates and, when induced, raised patient choices. Asking directly how much people liked and cared for their future selves did not predict choice, though those answers were near ceiling. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1259) from the NIH author manuscript (PMC3764505), served by NCBI’s PMC OAI-PMH service after Europe PMC refused this client; worth reading as the short statement of the future self-continuity programme, and as the record’s clearest case of a measured extent of the self predicting concern-like behaviour where directly reported caring did not. Read it knowing that the review gives almost no statistics, that the caring null comes from a ceiling, and that the circles are framed as similarity. |
| LIT-1703 | Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation | Markus & Kitayama (1991). A theoretical review. Cultures differ in how they construe the self. The independent construal, most clearly American and western European, is a bounded self defined by internal attributes. The interdependent construal, found in Japan and other Asian cultures but also in African, Latin American, Hindu and southern European ones, is a self defined by relationships with specific others in specific contexts: “others are included within the boundaries of the self” (p. 245), though it “does not result in a merging of self and other” (p. 228). The authors predict, and review evidence, that interdependent selves know more about others and describe themselves by context. They expect them to feel and express “other-focused” emotions (shame, sympathy, amae) more and “ego-focused” ones (anger, pride) less. They expect them to pursue achievement for others and to show modesty, not self-enhancement. They name a third option between selfishness and selflessness: “a self defined in relationship to others” (p. 247). | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1275) from the published APA scan posted by Markus on her own website (hazelmarkus.com/research); worth reading as the classic statement that cultures construe the self as more or less inclusive of others. For the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491) it supports the premise, a self that includes others, and names the thesis’s middle term, “an alternative to selfishness … besides selflessness” (p. 247). It does not support the step to self-interest: the authors deny merging and allow “genuine, other-oriented, altruistic” motives. The evidence is mostly cross-national contrasts, often second-hand or unpublished, with culture standing in for an unmeasured construal. |
| LIT-1706 | Close relationships as including other in the self | Aron, Aron, Tudor & Nelson (1991). In a close relationship the other’s resources, perspectives and characteristics are treated as partly one’s own: allocations to close others resemble allocations to self, and self/spouse traits are confused in reaction times. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; nothing on the Aron lab’s pages; perception.org has only a catalogue entry. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Branand, Mashek and Aron 2019 (LIT-1699). |
| LIT-1711 | The Minimal Group Paradigm and its maximal impact in research on social categorization | A short review of the minimal group paradigm (MGP) after 45 years. Its defining features are a novel, arbitrary and anonymous categorization in which no personal self-interest is served by the allocations. Tajfel’s first studies found that fairness guided allocations strongly, but in-group favouritism appeared reliably, and maximizing the in-group’s lead over the out-group sometimes beat maximizing its gain. The effect replicated with revised matrices. Critics say it may come from reciprocity expectations or from projecting a positive self onto the new group. It is largely confined to positive resources. When participants can also pay themselves, they take the most for themselves and still favour the in-group with what is left. The paradigm is now used mostly to study other effects of mere categorization: implicit attitudes, face processing, trust, communication. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1301), in place of LIT-1697, which could not be reached; worth reading as the record’s only account, at second hand, of what Tajfel et al. 1971 (LIT-1697, Unavailable) designed and found, and as a map of the critiques. Two of them bear on the owner’s thesis: favouritism may come from projecting the personal self onto the group, and personal gain comes first when it is on offer. |
| LIT-1714 | The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life | Lifton (1979). A psychiatric account of “symbolic immortality”: a sense of continuity with what came before and what will come after, sought in five modes, biological (living on through one’s children and people), creative (one’s works and influence), theological, natural, and experiential transcendence. Its loss underlies much of the psychopathology of death. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. The Internet Archive holds it only as a lending item; Lifton’s own 1973 restatement is closed. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Sturesteps 1992 (LIT-1689). |
| LIT-1721 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | León (2023). A we-identity is one a subject has as a group member, is at times aware of, endorses, and cares about. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization, and phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it as an account of the “we” in general. But the we-identities of close relationships arise by mutual individualization: partners grasp each other as non-substitutable and complementary. León proposes a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and integrationist extended-mind criteria. | Active — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1309) from the open-access published article; worth reading as a philosopher’s limit on self-categorization theory: the we-identities of close relationships (long friendships, romantic partnerships) rest on mutual individualization and non-substitutability, the opposite of depersonalization, so the theory cannot be the general account of the “we” that phenomenologists have taken it to be. It proposes a socially extended account of such identities. An argument from cases and from relationship research, with no data of its own. Source of THEORY-1115. |
| LIT-1723 | Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory | Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell (1987), Blackwell. The founding statement of self-categorization theory: personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization, a category becomes salient by meta-contrast and fit, and group behaviour follows from depersonalization, self-perception as an interchangeable exemplar of the ingroup prototype, rather than from attraction or interdependence among members. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-28; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive holds the 1987 Blackwell printing (rediscoveringsoc0000turn, 266 images) only as a controlled-lending item (access-restricted), which this client cannot borrow. The book has no DOI and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied: a lawful copy exists, as a lending item (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Turner et al. 1994 (LIT-1794), Skorich’s critique (LIT-1765), which quotes chapter 3 with page numbers, León (LIT-1721), Hornsey 2008 (LIT-1742) and Reimer et al. (LIT-1790). |
| LIT-1726 | Perceiving people as group members: The role of fit in the salience of social categorizations | Oakes, Turner & Haslam (1991). Subjects watching a staged discussion among arts and science students saw the arts/science categorization as most salient when the students disagreed along category lines and in the stereotype-consistent direction: comparative and normative fit together. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; UQ eSpace’s API refused the request (HTTP 403) and ANU Open Research had no match. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Spears 2021 (LIT-1771). |
| LIT-1728 v2 | Reinterpreting the empathy–altruism relationship: When one into one equals oneness | Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce & Neuberg (1997). In three questionnaire studies (five tests, N = 90, 74 and 263) students imagined a near stranger, an acquaintance, a friend or a close family member in need and chose how much to help. Closeness raised both empathic concern and “oneness” (the IOS scale with a “we” item). Empathic concern predicted helping, and still did with personal distress and sadness controlled, but with oneness entered it no longer did, while oneness still predicted helping. The authors read empathic concern as a signal of oneness and the helping as “nonaltruistic”: with self and other merged, the selfish–selfless distinction “loses its meaning”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1444) from a scan of the published article on a University of Wisconsin course page (https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/Cialdini%201997.pdf, JPSP 73(3), pp. 481–494, with an OCR text layer); worth reading as the empirical case that helping among close others tracks perceived self–other oneness, not empathic concern. Read it knowing that every helping measure is a hypothetical choice about an imagined person (eviction, orphaned children, a phone call), that the evidence is regression and path analysis of ratings taken after the helping choice, and that the authors call oneness-based helping “nonaltruistic”, not egoistic. |
| LIT-1729 | Empirical Approaches to Altruism | The SEP survey of the empirical egoism–altruism debate, revised in 2025. On the standard account, altruism needs an ultimate desire for another’s well-being; biological and social-science senses of “altruism” settle nothing about it. Batson’s experiments make a strong case against the aversive-arousal and social-punishment versions of egoism. Self-other merging is a different challenge: only numerical identity with the helped person would make helping egoistic, and none of the four measures used by Cialdini et al. and Batson et al. (IOS, “we”, perceived similarity, trait-rating difference) tests for it. The authors report that Batson et al. (1997) avoided Cialdini’s methodological problems and found empathy’s role “clearly evident”, and that a preregistered study (N = 680) supports the empathy–helping link. Altruism is still not shown: divine punishment, principlism, non-moral norms, and habitual or Pavlovian helping remain to be ruled out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1274), in place of LIT-1700 and LIT-1728, which could not be reached; worth reading as the shortest neutral account of the 1997 merging exchange the record holds: it quotes both papers’ measures, and it argues that a merging criterion must be one of numerical identity to matter for egoism. It does not report the 1997 results in numbers. |
| LIT-1735 | Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior | Swann, Gómez, Seyle, Morales & Huici (2009). A single pictorial item picks out people “fused” with their country (about 40% of Spanish students): fusion is bimodal, distinct from identification and specific to one group. The fused said they would fight and die for Spain more than other members would, and challenging or activating their personal self raised that further, with no effect on the nonfused. Personal and social identity act together, against self-categorization theory’s functional antagonism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1256) from the published version on the site of co-author Gómez’s IDENFUSION group at UNED; worth reading as the record’s closest empirical work to the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491): a measured self–group overlap in which the personal self is kept, not depersonalized, and in which a challenge to the personal self raises willingness to fight and die for the group. Self-reported intentions, Spanish students only. |
| LIT-1757 | Who is this “We”? Levels of collective identity and self representations | Brewer & Gardner (1996). Distinguishes three levels of self-representation, personal, relational (interpersonal) and collective (group), each with its own basis of self-worth and frame of reference, and shows that priming “we” shifts self-descriptions and social comparison. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; nothing on Ohio State or Northwestern pages; only a Scribd copy, not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Brewer 2007 (LIT-1775). |
| LIT-1759 | Surviving Death | Johnston (2010). Argues that personal identity is response-dependent (“Protean”), so the self-interest that seems to require survival is not fixed; the good person, who identifies with the interests of humanity at large, survives death in the onward life of others. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive’s copy (survivingdeath0000john) is for print-disabled readers only and is not lent, and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Johnston 2023 (LIT-1788), in which Johnston withdraws the book’s account of survival. |
| LIT-1772 | Social identity theory | A textbook chapter. Social identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from knowledge of membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value or emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1978). The theory has two parts. In the first, categorization is always self-relevant, and the motive for a positive social identity drives comparison with out-groups. That identity serves needs for certainty, self-esteem and meaning. In the second, members of low-status groups choose individual mobility, collective action or social creativity, depending on the permeability of group boundaries and the legitimacy and stability of status differences. Identification has cognitive, affective and behavioural components. Applications: identification improves health behaviour and buffers stress; at work it matters more than instrumental interdependence and motivates volunteers. An imagined common in-group raised Italian children’s willingness to help an immigrant classmate. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1315), in place of LIT-1695, which could not be reached; worth reading as a current statement of social identity theory by two of its principal researchers, read in place of Tajfel & Turner 1979 (LIT-1695, Unavailable). It is the record’s clearest source that the theory builds caring into the definition of social identity while measuring it as a separate component. Uncritical, with no effect sizes. |
| LIT-1775 | Social Identity and Close Relationships: What is the Connection? | Brewer argues that close relationships and group memberships are two distinct forms of social identity, each a way the individual self is extended to include others: the relational self is personalized (particular, non-interchangeable others), the collective self depersonalized (a symbolic group). They are not two routes to one need for belonging. Measures of group and interpersonal attachment (r = .46 and .33) and of loneliness separate them, and men and women weight them differently. She models each level as a regulatory system balancing opposed needs (uniqueness and similarity; autonomy and intimacy; separation and inclusion), with transfer between them. The model predicts two collectivisms: relational collectivists draw tight in-group boundaries, while individualists identify more readily with large inclusive groups. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1290), in place of LIT-1757, which could not be reached; worth reading as the tripartite self’s author restating it in her own words, with the claim that both relationships and groups extend the self, in two different ways. |
| LIT-1783 | Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification | A conceptual paper. It takes Cialdini et al.’s claim that empathy-induced helping is due to self-other merging and asks what “merging” could coherently mean. May argued that every reading either attributes absurd beliefs or fails to explain helping. The authors answer that merging is group identification: in empathizing with Y, X comes to conceive of Y as part of X’s social self, so Y’s welfare becomes constitutive of “our” welfare. They argue that this reading is behaviourally adequate, because it explains Batson’s results in the same way as minimal-group favouritism, and psychologically plausible, because it posits a non-doxastic self-representation rather than a belief in being two bodies. Helping so motivated is then altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level. The empirical dispute with Batson et al. (1997) is set aside. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1277), in place of LIT-1728 and LIT-1700, which could not be reached; worth reading as the only work in the record that states the owner’s thesis for empathic helping in a precise form: concern for another’s welfare is non-instrumental, and that welfare is constitutive of the helper’s first-person plural welfare. It offers no measure of group identification apart from empathy. |
| LIT-1786 | Group-level self-definition and self-investment: A hierarchical (multicomponent) model of in-group identification | In-group identification has five components on two correlated dimensions. Group-level self-definition is individual self-stereotyping (seeing oneself as like the average member) and in-group homogeneity; group-level self-investment is solidarity, satisfaction and centrality. In confirmatory factor analyses of Dutch, European and university identification in two cohorts (N = 464, 363), this model fit better than one-factor, two-factor and cognitive-versus-affective alternatives; the two dimensions correlated .61 to .77. Prospectively, the components predicted different things: centrality predicted perceived threat, homogeneity perceived intergroup difference, and, facing evidence of their group’s misdeeds, self-stereotyping predicted group-based guilt while satisfaction and centrality predicted legitimizing the misdeeds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1262), in place of LIT-1795, which could not be reached; worth reading as the direct test of whether identification splits into a self-definition and a caring dimension: it does, and they can work against each other. |
| LIT-1788 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston (2023). Records “a change in view” from Surviving Death (2010). There he argued that the Christian hope of resurrection fails and offered a this-worldly surrogate, “living on in the onward rush of humankind”, built on the idea that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which future embodiments are ours. Now, because reductionist accounts of personal identity breed “fellow travelers” (personites and the like) with moral status and conflicting interests, he holds that we are essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. Defines subserving, implementing and interdependence as non-reductive relations between mental and neural events. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1257) from the published version, open under CC BY-NC-ND at TheoLogica; worth reading as Johnston’s own retraction of the account of survival in Surviving Death (LIT-1759, Unavailable), read in its place. It now holds that we are essentially embodied wills, which drops the self-making view on which the earlier “onward rush of humankind” rested. The paper’s own subject is the metaphysics of survival, not altruism. |
| LIT-1794 | Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context | Turner, Oakes, Haslam and McGarty (1994). Self-categorization theory’s account of self and collective: personal and social identity are different levels of self-categorization, the emergent properties of group processes come from a shift in self-perception from the one to the other, and self-categories are inherently variable and context dependent because they are social comparative and relative to a frame of reference. | Active — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1284) from a scan of the published article supplied by the owner; worth reading as the shortest statement, by its authors, of self-categorization theory’s view of the self: personal and social identity are equally authentic levels of self-categorization, salience is readiness times fit (metacontrast and normative fit), and the level, kind, content and prototype of self-categories vary with the comparative frame. It goes on to speculate that the self is generated in context rather than stored. A theoretical paper whose evidence is the group’s own studies, reported without data. Source of THEORY-1114. |
| LIT-1871 | Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research | Metzinger (2013), Frontiers in Psychology 4:746. Minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), defined by Blanke and Metzinger (2009) as global identification with the body, self-location and a weak first-person perspective, may reduce to transparent spatiotemporal self-location: reports of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences describe a stable self located at an extensionless point, with no body. The paper proposes a phenomenal “unit of identification”, an “epistemic agent model” for the knowing self, and a research agenda for dream science, including the test case of phenomenally opaque self-location. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1434), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00746/pdf; also PMC3813926), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as Metzinger’s own later statement of minimal phenomenal selfhood: he proposes reducing it to “transparent self-location in a spatiotemporal frame of reference”, on the evidence of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body reports, and names, as an open research question, whether any case of phenomenally opaque self-location exists. It is a metatheoretical agenda: it reports survey figures from others and offers no new data, and the decisive case it asks for is not reported. |
| LIT-1941 | M-Autonomy | Metzinger (2015). M-autonomy is the capacity for second-order mental action, whose central element is veto: rules imposed on one’s own mental behaviour, goal selection and permanence, rational guidance, and the intentional inhibition, suspension or ending of an ongoing process. It comes in three degrees: represented knowledge that one has the ability, executed attentional control, and cognitive control. During mind-wandering the ability is kept and its representation in the self-model, the “epistemic agent model”, is lost, and an ability is exercised only when so represented. The return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it, a “functionally adequate form of self-deception”. The quantitative argument and the two-thirds figure repeat the 2013 paper’s. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1497), from the author’s copy on his Mainz university pages (blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/Metzinger_M-Autonomy_JCS_2015.pdf, linked from thomasmetzinger.com), typeset with the journal’s running heads and pagination, text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading for the sharpest statement of the will-organization question in Metzinger: what mind-wandering loses is “not the ability itself” but the conscious knowledge of it, and “one can only deliberately and autonomously exert an ability if that ability is explicitly represented in one’s phenomenal self-model” (THEORY-1300). It also argues that the return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it (THEORY-1298). A development of LIT-1942 with the empirical detail cut; no new data. |
| LIT-1942 | The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy | Metzinger (2013). Mind-wandering is a recurring, unnoticed loss of M-autonomy, the ability to control one’s own mental processes, whose defining component is veto: that every ongoing process could be suspended or ended, and that the person knows it. Conscious thought is for the most part subpersonal mental behaviour; it becomes personal-level only when integrated into an “epistemic agent model” (EAM), a transparent self-model of oneself as a knowing, attention-controlling self, which collapses at the onset of each episode. Proposes the “self-representational blink” and a shift in the “unit of identification” to individuate episodes. Its claim that we lack M-autonomy for “roughly two thirds” of conscious life is not borne out by its own minutes, which give about half. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1495), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931/pdf; also PMC3868016), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as the origin of M-autonomy: the ability to control one’s own mental processes, defined by its veto component, and lost without notice in every episode of mind-wandering. It argues that most conscious thought is subpersonal and that a thought becomes the person’s only by integration into an “epistemic agent model”. The “two thirds of conscious lifetime” without M-autonomy is not what its own figures give: they give about half (THEORY-1297). Conceptual work on others’ data; no new data. |
| LIT-1943 | The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports | Metzinger (2024), MIT Press, open access. More than 500 anonymised reports of “pure awareness” from an online survey of meditators (1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries, 92 questionnaire items, twelve factors), grouped by theme in 34 chapters with commentary. The book’s thesis is that consciousness can occur without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. It models pure awareness as a highest-level but “nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness, its tonic alertness, and so treats a first-person perspective as content, not a condition, of consciousness. The evidence is retrospective report from a self-selected sample. The methods chapter concedes that such reports cannot show the state was selfless when it occurred, while the summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established”. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1499), from the publisher’s open-access PDF: the introduction, the theoretical commentary of chapters 2, 4, 8, 25, 28 and 31, all of chapter 34 and the epilogue’s ethics sections were read; the report chapters were sampled, not read through. Worth reading as the fullest statement of Metzinger’s later account of consciousness without a self. It offers “pure awareness” as minimal phenomenal experience and models it as a highest-level but nonegoic model of the organism’s own epistemic openness. Its evidence is retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators. The methods chapter concedes the limits of that evidence and the summary overstates what it shows. |
| LIT-1944 | The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self | Metzinger (2009), Basic Books. The popular statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity: the conscious self is the content of a transparent self-model, and the experienced world is a “tunnel” the brain generates. Unread: registered from its bibliographic records. The theory is read in the record in LIT-450 and LIT-568. | Unavailable — registered 2026-11-01 at the owner’s request, not read. No lawful open full text was reached, and the book is in copyright with Basic Books. OpenAlex has no record of the book. Google Books shows no viewable edition. The Internet Archive’s copy (egotunnelscience0000metz) is in its print-disabled and lending collections, which require a borrowing account, so it is not an open copy. No author-posted copy was found. The theory it popularises is read in the record in LIT-450 and LIT-568, and its later development in LIT-1943. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1945 | The Problem of Mental Action: Predictive Control without Sensory Sheets | Metzinger (2017), in Philosophy and Predictive Processing. Mental action cannot be active inference through the body, since no sensory sheet is in the loop; it is offered instead as predictive control of effective connectivity aimed at the epistemic value of states in the self-model. Attentional agency controls precision expectations of an internal model. Cognitive agency selects among candidate thoughts that mind-wandering continually generates (“mental sleep-walking”), and M-autonomy lets the system “actively sculpt its own internal affordance landscape”. Whether the conscious epistemic agent model constitutes this control, represents and enables it, or is a phenomenal artefact, current data “do not help to decide”. Agency’s sense of origination may be an enculturated post-hoc confabulation. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1496), from the open-access PDF on the collection’s own site (predictive-mind.net/papers/the-problem-of-mental-action/at_download/paperPDF), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading for two things the 2013 and 2015 papers lack: a model of mental action as selection from a competition among candidate thoughts that mind-wandering supplies (the “cognitive affordance hypothesis”), and a plain statement that the data cannot yet decide whether the epistemic agent model constitutes mental control, represents and enables it, or is a phenomenal by-product (THEORY-1296). That withholds what M-autonomy (LIT-1941) asserted as a principle. Four testable hypotheses, none tested; no data. |
| LIT-1946 | Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness | Metzinger (2020), Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1(I):7. Proposes minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest consciousness and the entry point to a “minimal model” explanation. MPE is to lack minimal phenomenal selfhood, time and a spatial frame. Six constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts: Wakefulness, Low Complexity, Self-Luminosity, Introspective Availability, Epistemicity and Transparency/Opacity. Sixteen case studies flesh them out. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin Bayesian representation of the organism’s tonic alertness, a model of an “unpartitioned epistemic space”. It “definitely has representational content” and is “non-egoic self-modelling”. Tonic alertness without that model, as in unresponsive wakefulness, is not conscious. A conceptual paper. Its evidence is quoted report. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1498) from the journal’s open-access PDF. Worth reading as the founding statement of minimal phenomenal experience, the concept the record’s reading of Chandia-Jorquera et al. (LIT-1354) takes as given. It holds that pure awareness has representational content: a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, its “epistemic space”. On that account, consciousness without a self-model in the egoic sense still involves self-modelling, and it lacks even a phenomenal quality of oneness. Its evidence is sixteen quoted reports and texts. Its methodological problems, performative self-contradiction among them, are deferred to other papers. |
| LIT-1952 v2 | The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans | Marks, Lindsey and Olah (2026), Anthropic Alignment Science blog. The persona selection model, named and not claimed as original: pre-training teaches a language model a distribution over personas, post-training updates it into a posterior over Assistant personas, runtime context conditions it further, and the Assistant’s traits are a key determiner of behaviour. Surveyed evidence from generalization, behaviour and interpretability, and one new coin-flip experiment. The open question is exhaustiveness, set out as a spectrum from a shoggoth through a router that swaps personas to an operating system. “PSM” in the record already abbreviates Metzinger’s phenomenal self-model (NOTE-460), so this work is named in full. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1512), from the page at alignment.anthropic.com; worth reading as the plainest statement of the persona-distribution picture the record’s U6 to U12 build on, and for its spectrum of views on exhaustiveness, whose router is the record’s question of whether persona components condition one another. It is a named mental model with surveyed evidence, which its authors say they are unsure is complete. |
| LIT-1991 v2 | The Assistant Axis: Situating and Stabilizing the Default Persona of Language Models | Lu, Gallagher, Michala, Fish and Lindsey (2026), arXiv:2601.10387. Activation vectors for 275 prompted roles in Gemma 2 27B, Qwen 3 32B and Llama 3.3 70B span a low-dimensional persona space whose first component, shared across models, runs from fantastical roles to Assistant-like ones, with the default Assistant at its extreme; the Assistant Axis, the default minus the role mean, aligns with it and is largely present in base models. Steering along it modulates role-taking and persona-based jailbreaks. In synthetic multi-turn conversations the persona’s position follows the latest user message, drifting away in therapy-like and AI-philosophy talk; clamping the projection (activation capping) cuts harmful responses to persona jailbreaks by about 60% without measured capability loss. | Active — read 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1505, Skimmed: main text in full, appendices not read), from arXiv v1; worth reading for the geometry of persona space in three open-weight models, the Assistant at one end of a pre-existing first axis, and for the finding that within a conversation the persona’s position follows the latest user message, which bears on any episode-level model of personas (CLAIM-536, QUESTION-370). |
| LIT-1998 v2 | Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models | Chen, Arditi, Sleight, Evans and Lindsey (2025), arXiv:2507.21509. An automated pipeline turns a trait name and description into a persona vector, a difference of mean residual activations between trait-exhibiting and non-exhibiting responses, in Qwen2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B. The vectors steer evil, sycophancy and hallucination; last-prompt-token projections predict prompt-induced shifts, mainly between prompt types; finetuning shifts along them correlate with post-finetuning trait expression (r = 0.76–0.97); steering against them after finetuning, or towards them during it, limits the shift; and projecting training data onto them flags data that will induce the trait, including in real chat data. | Active — read 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1524, Skimmed: main text in full, appendices C.2, G.2 and M only), from arXiv v3; worth reading as the method behind PSM’s interpretability evidence: one difference-of-means trait direction tracks prompt-induced and finetuning-induced persona shifts, with r = 0.76–0.97 for the latter in two 7–8B models. It is a handle on movement along named traits, not a fitted persona distribution. |