self.
81 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-130 v2 | Floridi — The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-180 v4 | Clark & Chalmers — The Extended Mind | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-264 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-268 | Identification and Identity | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-364 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation, and like a fictional character it is indeterminate beyond what its story fixes. A mindless novel-writing robot can author a self whose story is true of the robot. Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography, and when the story coheres around two points there are two selves. The essay argues by analogy and thought experiment. Its evolutionary account of self-talk is speculation, and its evidence is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-370 | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds — Role play with large language models (read for the self) | Read for the self. The simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency, “not even simulated versions”; simulacra only role-play characters that have them, so when an agent says “I” there is “no-one at home”. The paper names, and does not answer, the question of which self a dialogue agent would act to preserve: hardware, process or instance. The denial of a self follows from the framing; no argument rules out a conscious actor behind the roles. | Read |
| NOTE-372 | Self models | Metzinger’s compact statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity. No substantial self exists; there is a self-model, partly conscious (the PSM), used for global control. A phenomenal self exists if and only if the PSM is transparent; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation. Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, and embodiment comes in three orders. The central claim is stated with a prediction, not argued; the examples are cited. The online text has editing slips and reference gaps. | Read |
| NOTE-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-377 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | A short review that sets the minimal self (present self-consciousness) against the narrative self (extended in time), splits the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, and ties their dissociation in schizophrenic thought insertion to Frith’s forward comparator model. It reports an embodied minimal self in neonatal imitation and a momentary one in Strawson and in Tani’s robot, and proposes, against Dennett, that the narrative self is the sum of its narratives. Evidence is cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-382 | Shanahan — Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | A Wittgensteinian treatment: consciousness talk is anchored in what is public, so an exotic entity is a candidate only if we could engineer an encounter with it in a shared world. Disembodied chat agents are not candidates; virtually embodied ones could be. On the self: no “self worth preserving” without body, history and autobiographical memory, and no “person behind the mask” for a role player, whose identity is a shifting distribution of roles. Argued by method and scenario; nothing is measured. | Read |
| NOTE-383 | Against Narrativity | Rejects the descriptive and the normative Narrativity theses. Separates Diachronic from Episodic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision within Narrativity. Places Dennett, Schechtman, Sartre and himself on that grid. Argues that Episodic lives are normal and can be good, that a from-the-inside memory need not present as one’s own, and that self-narration risks falsification. The argument is testimony and distinction-drawing; the empirical claims are asserted. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-430 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | RFT stated for clinicians. Human relating is bidirectional and arbitrarily applicable, a generalized operant under contextual control, with mutual and combinatorial entailment and transformation of function. Relating relations explains metaphor, rules are networks whose coordination with events regulates behaviour, and the self is content, process and context. These are offered as the reason direct-contingency behaviour therapy is “inadequate”, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT readings explicitly labelled heuristic. | Read |
| NOTE-431 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | The ACT model, read in an early manuscript. Psychopathology is psychological inflexibility: cognitive fusion (fed by literality, reason-giving and emotional control) supports experiential avoidance, and both displace present-moment contact and values. Six processes restore flexibility. The manuscript’s evidence: AAQ correlations with distress (21 studies), component studies of acceptance and defusion, mediation in seven trials, and weighted outcome effect sizes (d = .49 post and .69 follow-up against active treatments). | Read |
| NOTE-439 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Needs in SDT are innate psychological nutriments, identified functionally by the costs of their thwarting, not by individual differences in their strength. The three needs organize findings on intrinsic motivation and internalization, predict that both the “why” (autonomous vs controlled regulation) and the “what” (intrinsic vs extrinsic aspirations) of goals affect well-being, and explain need substitutes and rigid defences when needs are thwarted. Autonomy is self-organization, defended as an evolved, domain-general design feature. | Read |
| NOTE-441 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | SDT’s autonomy is “regulation by the self”: acting with reflective endorsement, graded along the internalization continuum, compatible with external influence, dependence and a single option. Ryan and Deci align it with phenomenological and hierarchical (Frankfurt, Dworkin) accounts and use that definition to answer behaviourist, social-cognitive, reductionist, nonconscious-priming, choice-overload and cultural critiques. Autonomy lies not in being an uncaused cause but in the capacity to “reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). | Read |
| NOTE-442 v2 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | SDT’s canonical short statement. Social contexts that support competence, autonomy and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation and let people internalize and integrate extrinsic regulations; controlling, rejecting or overchallenging contexts undermine intrinsic motivation and leave regulations external or introjected. Autonomy is graded: four kinds of extrinsic motivation lie on a continuum of relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell’s quasi-simplex). Basic needs are defined by their consequences for well-being, and need-deprivation is offered as a principal source of distress and psychopathology. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-453 | Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model | Schwartz’s short statement of the IFS model. A person is “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, parts forced into managerial, exiled or firefighting roles by experience, which can return to valuable roles. At the core is a Self with leadership qualities (the eight Cs), reached when parts “step back”, as in the founding case of “Diane”. The Self is an active healer, not a witness. A practitioner’s essay; its evidence is clinical experience. | Read |
| NOTE-457 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Chapter 1 only. Schwartz tells how IFS grew out of structural and strategic family therapy. Clients with bulimia described warring “parts”. Coercing parts made matters worse, and curiosity revealed that they protected the client. When interfering parts were asked to “step back”, a calm, compassionate “Self” appeared that needed no development. The chapter ends with eight essentials: ecological respect for protectors, Self-leadership, unblending, attention to polarizations, non-pathologizing burdens, movement between system levels, and innate self-healing. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-460 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger’s own sketch of the self-model theory. Six constraints (globality, presentationality, transparency, convolved holism, dynamicity, perspectivalness) build up consciousness; a transparent self-model yields phenomenal selfhood, so “no such things as selves exist in the world”; transparency is graded, inversely proportional to the attentional availability of earlier processing stages. Phenomenal unity is one global functional cluster. The first-person perspective is a model of the intentionality relation, whose iteration gives introspective and social intelligence. A theory statement: no new evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-469 | Thine Own Self: True Self-Concept Accessibility and Meaning in Life | Five studies with students. True-self accessibility, the residual speed of “me” judgments for one’s own true-self traits, predicts MLQ presence of meaning (β = .29, .24, .19 in Studies 1, 2, 4) beyond actual-self accessibility, affect, need satisfaction, liking, overlap, state self-esteem and AI-3 authenticity. Subliminal true-self primes raised reported meaning against actual-self primes (Study 3, ANCOVA F = 4.46) and against disliked actual-self primes (Study 5, contrast F = 5.07), with disliked true-self traits as effective as liked ones. | Read |
| NOTE-470 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams’s review essay on 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”. Storytelling is placed in human evolution as a tool for simulating social life and binding groups. The self is layered as actor, then agent, then author, with the life story arriving in adolescence on the back of autobiographical memory, theory of mind and autobiographical reasoning. Story features predict well-being and generativity. Culture supplies master narratives. Claims are cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-488 | Conscious birds | Review. Crow NCL neurons track the reported percept, not the stimulus, and NCL is nuclear rather than laminar; the pigeon connectome has the hub-and-module form GNWT requires; avian pallium has recurrent connectivity (RPT); IIT’s markers (PCI, grid-like lattices) are untested in birds. Pigeons and roosters fail the mark test but discriminate their mirror image from a conspecific. GNWT and RPT requirements “seem to be mostly met”; the authors call the evidence short of a strong conclusion. | Read |
| NOTE-489 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | ALARM: basic arousal (level-1 experience, subcortical) alarms the agent when homeostasis fails, triggering survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised learning without choice; general alertness (level-2, cortical, attention-guided) enables flexible learning and decision; reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness plus metacognitive self-relational content, enabling long-term planning. IIT, HOT and GNWT are said to cover only general alertness. Argued, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-507 | Damasio & Damasio — Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | An Essay with no data. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, provided by continuous homeostatic feelings that are conscious in themselves and “lend” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid because interoceptive pathways (unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic, barrier-free) let the body act on its own map. Evidence is cited clinical contrast: posterior brainstem lesions cause coma, extensive cortical lesions may not; anaesthetics act at membrane-level sensing below feeling. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-565 | Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise | A lecture arguing that deep responsibility extends beyond the moral, to prudential and aesthetic traits and to art, and that the self-disclosure view explains this. Watson’s two-level view, attributability with accountability stacked on top, is rejected: the two are independent, and accountability may need nothing metaphysically robust. What makes a self a fit target of reactive attitudes is offered as a hunch: an intelligent self that perceives, understands and appreciates the world as we do. | Read |
| NOTE-710 | boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: collapsed contexts | Networked publics remove the boundaries that kept a person’s social contexts apart. Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist while the audiences are segmented, and collide when the medium brings them together. People manage the collision by scripting it (a wedding), by noticing it (meeting the boss while out with friends), or by rebuilding walls (privacy settings, false details). Online, the collision often goes unseen by the person it happens to. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-990 | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes — Trait phenomenological control and the rubber hand illusion | Hypnotisability predicted rubber hand illusion reports after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing (n = 353, about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), a visual control item as well, and synchronous drift weakly (rs 0.11); it also predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The expectation manipulation failed and the pre-registered difference-score test was inconclusive, so the study shows that the standard controls do not exclude suggestion, not that the illusion is suggestion. | Read |
| NOTE-991 | Apps & Tsakiris — The free-energy self | A free-energy account of self-recognition and body ownership. One’s own body, face and voice are represented probabilistically as “me” by a high-level multimodal prior learned from cross-modal correlations, and the self is “the most parsimonious and accurate explanation for sensory inputs”. The rubber hand, enfacement and rubber-voice illusions are one effect: synchronous stimulation leaves unimodal surprise that multimodal areas explain away by shifting probability from one’s own body part to the other’s. Context acts as a prior. No brain area is self-specific. The authors grant there is little direct evidence and that the account is hard to falsify with standard fMRI. | Read |
| NOTE-992 | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson — No causal link between hand position sense and limb ownership | A motor slid the hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during brushing, too slowly to be noticed. Pointing followed it by about 5–6 cm, but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and not on where the hand was moved, in two experiments of 18. With the hand still, the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion reappeared. The authors conclude drift is not a cause of ownership; the null is from small samples within the illusion’s known spatial range. | Read |
| NOTE-993 | Kalckert & Ehrsson — Moving a rubber hand that feels like your own | A moving rubber hand illusion in which the participant’s hidden finger moves a model finger by a rod. Synchrony gave ownership, agency and drift toward the model; asynchrony removed all three. Passive movement removed agency and kept ownership and drift; a model hand rotated 180° removed ownership and drift and kept agency. The double dissociation is on questionnaires; agency was stronger, and tied to ownership, only when the hand was owned. | Read |
| NOTE-995 | Starmans & Bloom — Windows to the soul | Asked which of two pictured flies or snowflakes was “closer to” a cartoon character, preschoolers and adults chose those near the eyes, even when the eyes were on an alien’s chest and even over positions the character could see. The authors conclude that people intuitively locate the self at or near the eyes, and, since 4-year-olds do it too, not from learned ideas about the brain. The judgement is about where another, drawn person is; the step to the self, and on to a “phenomenological sense” of where we reside, is assumed and not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-997 | Ehrsson et al. — No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | A reanalysis of Lush et al.’s (2020) open data, n = 353. The synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in rubber-hand illusion ratings is unrelated to hypnotisability (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7), is significant in every hypnotisability quartile, and is not changed by explicit suggestions about which condition should work; the hypnotisability correlations Lush et al. report appear equally for the asynchronous condition and an “impossible” control item. The authors conclude the illusion is a perceptual one, “driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms”. The reply grants every number and disputes that the asynchronous condition controls for expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-998 | Hohwy & Paton — Explaining away the body | With a foreign arm seen exactly where one’s own arm lies, synchronous tapping raised ratings that the felt touch was produced on the seen arm, and after onset also that a finger hovering 5 cm away caused it or that it was caused on a cardboard box; the box gave no synchrony difference without prior onset. Samples of 9 to 13, single leading questions, no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a 0.13 °C cooling of the real hand in one comparison of four, significant only one-tailed. | Read |
| NOTE-999 | Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger & Blanke — Video ergo sum | In video virtual reality, synchronous stroking of one’s back and of a body seen 2 m ahead made people rate that body as theirs and shift their felt self-location about 17–25 cm toward it, in two samples of 14; a mannequin worked, a box mostly did not. Nobody felt disembodied or saw from elsewhere, so the authors claim a partial, heautoscopy-like state, not an out-of-body experience. The effects are modest and partly inconsistent, and critics argued they may be self-recognition in a video system rather than an illusion of ownership. | Read |
| NOTE-1000 | Seth — Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | An opinion article that extends predictive coding to interoception. Felt emotion is the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals. Prediction errors are registered in the anterior insula, and are also cancelled by autonomic action under attenuated precision. The experience of body ownership is the same inference run over interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. The evidence is indirect and cited: insula anticipation and error responses, false cardiac feedback, interoceptive sensitivity predicting rubber-hand susceptibility, and a heartbeat-synchronous virtual hand owned more. No direct test is claimed. | Read |
| NOTE-1001 | Roseboom & Lush — Serious problems with interpreting rubber hand illusion experiments | Resampling 351 synchronous-condition reports from Lush et al. 2020 into 10,000 studies of 20, the authors find that samples from above the median of hypnotisability almost always “find” the rubber hand illusion, and samples from below it find agreement with the ownership statement about 4% of the time. The ownership result holds at n = 50; the result for the averaged statements is largely a matter of power. No asynchronous condition, drift or new data are analysed. | Read |
| NOTE-1002 | Blanke & Metzinger — Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest experience of being a self, and gives it three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, self-location, and a weak, geometrical first-person perspective. Part ownership (rubber hand, somatoparaphrenia) does not reach MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions do, varying it dimension by dimension. A passive multisensory sense of owning the whole body suffices, so agency is causally enabling but not constitutive. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-1003 | Lush & Seth — Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | The reply to Ehrsson et al. accepts their reanalyses and denies their reading: expectancies are higher for synchronous than asynchronous brushing, the difference does not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07), so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict. Agreement with the ownership item rises with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point, rs = 0.27) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Whether multisensory integration matters to RHI measures awaits experiments that control expectation. It shows that the suggestion control THEORY-765 accepts can be met without the confound being removed. | Read |
| NOTE-1004 | Longo et al. — What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | 131 people rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis found embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement and affect in both conditions and deafference after asynchrony only; embodiment split into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location crossed from negative to positive with synchrony and each predicted proprioceptive drift (1.34 cm against 0.30 cm); agency stayed negative. No control separates any of it from expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-1005 | Lush — Demand characteristics confound the rubber hand illusion | People told about the rubber hand procedure, but never put through it, expect the illusion statements more than the control statements and more under synchronous than asynchronous brushing (d = 1.40 and 1.05, n = 20), which is the pattern published reports show. So the field’s standard controls do not control for suggestion. The paper does not show that the illusion is suggestion, and says so. | Read |
| NOTE-1006 | Botvinick & Cohen — Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | The founding report of the rubber hand illusion. Synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand made ten subjects feel the touch at the rubber hand and feel it as their own; after 30 minutes, blind reaches drifted toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, and asynchronous brushing removed both effects. The authors read it as constraint satisfaction among vision, touch and proprioception, and conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Read |
| NOTE-1008 | Alsmith & Longo — Where exactly am I? | Ten adults pointed a rotating pointer “directly at” themselves, by hand blindfolded or by eye. Answers fell mostly on the upper face or the upper torso, and the pointer’s starting position, above or below, decided which. The authors conclude that the self is judged neither spread over the body nor at one point, and that the spatial concept of the self is “inherently ambiguous”. A pilot-sized study with a fifth of its trials lost and a misreported reanalysis; its start effect is also what a first-acceptable-stop strategy predicts. | Read |
| NOTE-1009 | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst — Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift do not go hand in hand | With robot stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward a rubber hand was as large when the hand was only seen as under synchronous stroking (about 6 cm), and as large under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s; only continuous asynchrony kept it near zero. Ownership by questionnaire needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift is visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, separate from ownership, and not a proxy for it. Groups of ten; the vision-only ownership report is anecdotal. | Read |
| NOTE-1056 | Gładziejewski — Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the manifest image | A philosophy paper with no data. It traces Dennett’s compression criterion for real patterns through minimum description length and Bayesian inference to variational free energy, so that learning a generative model is extracting real patterns from sensory data. It concludes that the manifest image is a structural description of sensory data, veridical even in a matched vat. The self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, so selves are real as patterns and unreal as substances, and which verdict to give is a dispute over criteria, not facts. It says nothing about consciousness or illusion. | Read |
| NOTE-1080 | Cooley — Human nature and the social order | The looking-glass self is one large class of the social self, not its definition: “I” is a feeling of appropriation attached to any idea, and in the looking-glass kind its tone is set by an imagined judgement in an imagined mind. The imagined others need not be living, present or accurately pictured, and the group is realized in the mind through imagined persons. Non-conformity driven by opposition is itself steered by what others enjoin. An essay from observation and literature, with no method that could fail. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1250 | Trauma, prejudice, large-group identity and psychoanalysis | A memorial lecture at the Freud Museum. Large-group identity is a tent’s canvas worn over each person’s individual identity, fixed in childhood through what parents deposit and unchangeable after adolescence. In two decades of unofficial dialogues, Volkan saw participants who felt their large-group identity threatened turn, with emotion, to an injury their ancestors suffered centuries ago. The shared image of such an event, real or mythologized, changes function across generations and becomes an identity marker: a chosen trauma. It feeds entitlement to recover what was lost and, in a “time collapse”, makes the old event feel recent, as with Kosovo 1389 under Milošević. The Holocaust is not a chosen trauma: it is recent, its stories are alive, and it is mourned rather than kept as a wound for revenge. | Read |
| NOTE-1256 | Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior | Five preliminary studies and three two-wave experiments with Spanish students. A single pictorial item, the self as a small circle wholly inside a circle for Spain, picks out the “fused” (about 40%). Fusion is bimodal, related to but distinct from identification (r = .26 to .56) and specific to one group. The fused said they would fight and die for Spain more than others would. Activating their personal self, by challenging negative self-views or asking what they would fight for themselves, raised that willingness further; it did nothing for the nonfused. The authors read this as personal and social identity being “functionally equivalent” in the fused, against self-categorization theory’s functional antagonism. | Read |
| NOTE-1257 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston withdraws Surviving Death’s account of survival. There, he recalls, the resurrection hope failed and the substitute was living on “in the onward rush of humankind”, on the view that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which embodiments are ours. Now he holds that every reductionist account of personal identity breeds “fellow travelers” with moral status and conflicting interests: personites, R-variants, overlapping “Theons” and modal variants. To avoid them, he holds, we must be essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. He argues that emergent substance dualism is a “fig leaf” for divine creation, and gives non-reductive relations of subserving, implementing and interdependence between mental and neural events. | Read |
| NOTE-1259 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | A review, mostly of the author’s own work. Following Parfit, people who feel less connected to their future self treat it like a stranger and save less for it. Similarity to one’s self in ten years, chosen as overlapping circles adapted from Aron’s scale, predicted patient choices and assets; a future self represented neurally like another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47); seeing one’s age-progressed face raised saving; respect for the elderly tracked and raised saving. Directly reported liking and caring for the future self did not predict choice, but were near ceiling. The future self may extend, at life’s end, to one’s offspring. | Read |
| NOTE-1262 | Group-level self-definition and self-investment: A hierarchical (multicomponent) model of in-group identification | Seven studies with Dutch students. Identification has five components on two correlated dimensions (r = .61 to .77): self-definition (self-stereotyping, in-group homogeneity) and self-investment (solidarity, satisfaction, centrality). The model fit Dutch, European and university identification better than one-factor or cognitive-versus-affective models. Weeks to months later, the components predicted different reactions. Shown their group’s mistreatment of Rwandan asylum seekers, those who saw themselves as like the average European felt more guilt, while those satisfied with being European, and for whom it was central, legitimized the policy. The self-circle overlap measure correlated with self-investment as much as with self-stereotyping. | Read |
| NOTE-1274 | Empirical Approaches to Altruism | A survey by Doris, Stich, Walmsley and Schulz. Under the standard account, altruism means an ultimate desire for another’s well-being, and evolutionary and social-science senses of the word do not bear on it. Batson’s experiments tell against the social-punishment and aversive-arousal versions of egoism. Self-other merging would make helping egoistic only if the helper took herself to be numerically identical with the other. The four measures used in the 1997 exchange test likeness or something unclear, not identity. On the causal question, the entry says only that Batson et al. corrected Cialdini’s methods and found empathy’s role “clearly evident”. Altruism is still unproven: divine punishment, principles, norms and habit remain open explanations. | Read |
| NOTE-1275 | Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation | A theoretical review. Cultures construe the self as independent, bounded and defined by inner attributes (most clearly American), or as interdependent, defined by relationships with specific others in specific contexts (Japanese and other Asian, also African, Latin American, Hindu, southern European). For the interdependent self “others are included within the boundaries of the self”, without “a merging of self and other”. This is predicted to shape cognition (more knowledge of others, contextual self-description), emotion (other-focused over ego-focused emotions) and motivation (achievement for others, modesty over self-enhancement). The authors name “a self defined in relationship to others” as an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. | Read |
| NOTE-1276 | Pair-Bonding as Inclusion of Other in the Self: A Literature Review | A short review by Aron’s group. In a close relationship each partner experiences 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, validated as subjective closeness. It goes with cognitive signs of inclusion: slower “me/not-me” judgements on traits where the partner differs, more self–partner confusions in memory, plural pronouns. Recent studies tie overlap to self-like treatment of a partner. High-overlap people keep a positive view of a partner shown inferior. Their sleep suffers more from a partner’s pain. Honour-endorsing men high in overlap are more aggressive toward a partner’s moral violation. The review adds a two-dimensional model of relational self-change and a measure of perceived inclusion. No new data. | Read |
| NOTE-1277 | Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification | Cialdini et al. said empathy-induced helping is due to self-other merging. May argued that no reading of “merging” is both coherent and explanatory. The authors read it as group identification. In empathizing with Y, X comes to conceive of Y as part of X’s social self, so Y’s welfare is constitutive of X’s first-person plural welfare. This explains Batson’s similarity-induced helping in the same way as minimal-group favouritism, and needs no belief in being two bodies, since identification is a Pushmi-Pullyu representation (Salice and Miyazono). Such helping is altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level. The empirical rebuttal by Batson et al. (1997) is set aside as out of scope. | Read |
| NOTE-1284 | Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context | Self-categorization theory’s statement on the self. Personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization, equally authentic. Which category is used, and with what content and prototype, is set by perceiver readiness and fit (metacontrast and normative fit), and so varies lawfully with the comparative frame of reference. The authors go on to speculate that the self is not a stored structure at all but is generated each time. A theoretical paper; the evidence is the group’s own studies, reported and not presented. | Read |
| NOTE-1285 | Group-level emotions | A review of intergroup emotions theory by its founders. Identifying with a group makes it “an aspect of the self through self-categorization”, so events are appraised for what they mean to the group, and emotions are felt on its behalf. Four facts: the emotion shifts with the salient membership; members converge on a group norm; no personal involvement is needed; and identification moderates the effect, the highly identified sometimes reappraising to avoid guilt. Group-based emotions predict collective action and treatment of out-groups and the in-group, and can be regulated. No new data. | Read |
| NOTE-1290 | Social Identity and Close Relationships: What is the Connection? | Close relationships and group memberships are two forms of social identification, “processes by which the individual self is extended to include others”: the relational self personalized, the collective self depersonalized. They are distinct systems, not two routes to one need for belonging. Group and interpersonal attachment correlate only .46 (anxiety) and .33 (avoidance), and loneliness has relational and collective factors. Each level regulates opposed needs, as hunger and thirst do, with transfer between them. Relational collectivists bound their in-groups tightly; individualists identify more with large, inclusive groups and show as much in-group favouritism toward them. | Read |
| NOTE-1301 | The Minimal Group Paradigm and its maximal impact in research on social categorization | A brief review of the minimal group paradigm. Groups are novel, arbitrary and anonymous, and allocations serve no personal interest. Tajfel’s first studies found fairness strong but in-group favouritism reliable, and maximizing the in-group’s relative advantage sometimes beat maximizing its gain. It replicated with revised matrices. It is criticized as reciprocity, as projection of the positive personal self onto the new group, and as limited to positive resources. When participants could also pay themselves, they kept the most for themselves and still favoured the in-group with the rest. The paradigm now serves mostly to study other effects of mere categorization. | Read |
| NOTE-1309 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | A we-identity is held as a group member, is at times salient, is endorsed, and varies in affective salience. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization: seeing oneself as an interchangeable exemplar of a prototype. Phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it for the “we” in general. But close relationships, such as long friendships and partnerships, yield we-identities by mutual individualization, in which each grasps the other as non-substitutable. So depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity. León sketches a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and on extended-mind criteria. | Read |
| NOTE-1312 | The Concept and Psychological Consequences of Symbolic Immortality | A 1991–92 ANU master’s thesis testing Rank’s claim that people need to feel they transcend death, through children, an afterlife or creative work, and Lifton’s two added modes, nature and experiential transcendence (a mystical expansion of the self). 440 Australians aged 18 to 88 rated vignettes as consolation in imagined terminal illness. Having a mode, such as children, predicted accepting it, and so did religious affiliation; education lowered acceptance. The secular modes went with accepting death as final. The modes predicted death anxiety, neuroticism and personality only weakly; Rank’s sex-difference and neuroticism hypotheses failed. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1315 | Social identity theory | A textbook chapter. Social identity is the part of the self-concept that comes from group membership “together with the value or emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1978). 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. Low-status members choose individual mobility, collective action or social creativity by permeability, legitimacy and stability. Identification has cognitive, affective and behavioural components. At work, identification is said to matter more than “selfish concerns” of interdependence. An imagined common in-group raised children’s helping of an immigrant classmate. | Read |
| NOTE-1319 | A comparison of minimal group induction procedures | Two experiments (N = 42, 73) with US undergraduates compare four minimal-group inductions: false feedback on painting preference (the classic), imagined assignment, random assignment, and memorizing five names of one group with no categorization. All four gave comparable explicit in-group liking, identification and bonus-money favouritism. Only memorization gave large IAT effects of in-group preference and self-association (d up to 2.16 against the classic); the classic gave none. Implicit and explicit measures correlated weakly. Allocation favouritism tracked explicit identification (r = .37) and was carried mostly by one colour group. | Read |
| NOTE-1398 | Johansson, Hall, Sikström and Olsson — Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome | In a card-trick experiment, 120 people chose the more attractive of two female faces and were sometimes handed the face they had rejected. Only 13% of the 354 manipulated trials were detected at the time, at most 26% counting every form of later detection, and the detection rate did not depend on how similar the faces were. The reasons given for the rejected face did not differ from reasons given for real choices in length, emotionality, specificity or certainty, and some named features only the rejected face had. The authors call this choice blindness. | Read |
| NOTE-1409 | Merton — The self-fulfilling prophecy | Names the self-fulfilling prophecy, “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true”, and applies it to American ethnic and racial prejudice. Beside it the essay sets a second route, “moral alchemy”, in which the in-group condemns the out-group whatever it does by renaming the same conduct. It argues that institutional change, not education or good will, breaks the circle. | Read |
| NOTE-1412 | Nisbett and Wilson — Telling more than we can know | Reviews dissonance, attribution, subliminal-perception, problem-solving and bystander studies, and reports eight small studies of its own, to argue that people have little or no introspective access to the processes by which stimuli affect their judgments. Their reports come from a priori causal theories, which observers given only a description share: in Nisbett and Bellows, subject and observer reports correlated .77 to .99, and both were accurate only for the judgment the culture has rules for. | Read |
| NOTE-1432 | boyd — Taken Out of Context: networked publics and context collapse | In boyd’s full chapters on networked publics, collapsed contexts are one of three dynamics produced by four properties of networked media: without spatial, social and temporal boundaries, distinct contexts are hard to keep apart, and a performer may not see the collision. The teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation read by an unintended audience that lacks its context, and their remedy is to control the audience, not to unify the presentation. The evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict when audiences are kept apart against when they meet. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1434 | Metzinger — Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? | Metzinger proposes that minimal phenomenal selfhood reduces to transparent spatiotemporal self-location, because people report a stable self in bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences, located at an extensionless point without a body. He predicts that such self-location is necessary and sufficient for a minimal sense of self, and asks whether a phenomenally opaque self-location, experienced as a representation, has ever been observed. The paper is an agenda: its evidence is other people’s prevalence figures, which it calls ambiguous, and it reports no opaque case. | Read |
| NOTE-1444 | Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce & Neuberg — When one into one equals oneness | In three questionnaire studies, students imagined a near stranger, acquaintance, friend or close family member in need and chose how much costly help to give. Closeness raised empathic concern and oneness (the IOS circles plus a “we” item), and both predicted helping; with oneness entered, empathic concern dropped to non-significance in every test, while oneness kept predicting. The authors read empathic concern as an emotional signal of oneness and call the helping “nonaltruistic”, not egoistic. All helping is hypothetical and the case is regression on correlated ratings. | Read |
| NOTE-1495 | Metzinger — The myth of cognitive agency | Mind-wandering is a recurring, unnoticed loss of M-autonomy, the veto-centred ability to control one’s own mental processes. Most conscious thought is subpersonal mental behaviour, and a thought becomes the person’s only when integrated into a transparent “epistemic agent model”. The paper states that we lack M-autonomy for about two thirds of conscious life; its own minutes give 52%. | Read |
| NOTE-1496 | Metzinger — The problem of mental action | Mental action, which has no sensory sheet in its loop, is cast as predictive control of effective connectivity aimed at the epistemic value of states in the self-model. Mind-wandering supplies a competition among candidate thoughts that control selects from. Whether the conscious epistemic agent model constitutes the control, represents and enables it, or is a by-product, the data “do not help to decide”, which leaves open what M-autonomy stated as a principle. | Read |
| NOTE-1497 | Metzinger — M-Autonomy | M-autonomy is the capacity for second-order mental action, centred on veto. What mind-wandering loses is not the ability but its representation in the self-model, the “epistemic agent model”, and an ability can be deliberately exercised only when it is so represented. The return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it. The paper repeats the 2013 estimate of two thirds, which its own minutes do not give. | Read |
| NOTE-1498 | Metzinger — Minimal phenomenal experience | A conceptual paper. It proposes “minimal phenomenal experience”, the phenomenology of pure awareness in meditation, as the entry point for a minimal-model explanation of consciousness. Six phenomenological constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts and illustrated by sixteen quoted reports. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, “an internal model of an epistemic space”. It has representational content, lacks a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, and cannot itself be remembered. | Read |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1505 | Lu, Gallagher, Michala, Fish & Lindsey — The Assistant Axis | Role vectors for 275 archetypes in Gemma 2 27B, Qwen 3 32B and Llama 3.3 70B span a low-dimensional persona space whose first component runs from fantastical roles to Assistant-like ones, with the default Assistant at one end; the contrast vector from it, the Assistant Axis, is largely present in base models. Steering along it modulates role-taking and persona jailbreaks. In synthetic multi-turn conversations the model’s position along the axis is set mainly by the latest user message, and therapy-like and AI-philosophy conversations drift away from the Assistant; capping the projection cuts persona-jailbreak harm by about 60% without measured capability loss. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1512 | Marks, Lindsey & Olah — The Persona Selection Model | A named statement of an existing idea: 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. The evidence is surveyed, not new. Its open question is exhaustiveness, laid out as a spectrum from the “shoggoth” through the “router”, which swaps personas without any persona having the goal, to the “operating system”. | Read |
| NOTE-1524 | Chen, Arditi, Sleight, Evans & Lindsey — Persona vectors | Difference-of-means directions in the residual stream, extracted automatically from a trait’s name and description, steer and monitor evil, sycophancy and hallucination in Qwen2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B. The shift that finetuning induces along a trait’s vector correlates with the trait’s expression afterwards (r = 0.76–0.97); steering against the vector, or towards it during training, limits the shift; and projecting training data onto the vector flags data that will induce the trait. Prompt-time monitoring works mainly between prompt types. | Skimmed |