The claim
In THEORY-067 an interest is “selected by one kind of reward over one time range”. What makes two interests two is that each dominates at a different delay, and that is possible only where the valuation curves cross. Under exponential discounting the curves never cross, and every delay ranks the options the same way. On Ainslie’s own terms there is then one interest, and nothing to bargain with.
So the population is not an inventory of standing agents. It is a description of where, over a given choice and horizon, the agent’s valuations come apart. The same person is one interest over choices whose curves stay apart, and many over choices whose curves cross. The desynchronization (TERM-050) comes first, and the multiplicity is its product.
This is why the owner’s prompt can treat temporal discounting as the source of the multi-agent self, “self” here in the integrated sense (TERM-045, sense 6), and synchronization as its cure. Anything that keeps the curves from crossing, or that keeps a crossing from deciding action, makes the agent act as one. CLAIM-162 and CLAIM-156 are the two routes the prompt names.
What it does not say
- That every multiplicity of self is intertemporal. IFS’s simultaneous parts (LIT-591), model-based against model-free control (THEORY-062) and one motive state checking another (THEORY-056) differ in method or content, not in delay. They are a second axis of multiplicity, and this claim is silent on them.
- That the person is many persons. THEORY-067 already denies this reading, and so does this claim.
- That Ainslie’s mechanism is true. The claim is about how his account individuates interests, and it inherits the account’s untested standing.
Note of 2026-10-28: what holds it back
Kept Proposed. This is the record’s reading of how THEORY-067 individuates interests, and its one ground, THEORY-067, is Proposed: its mechanism, bundling by self-prediction, is untested. The claim goes Active when THEORY-067 does. A narrower claim about what the précis says would not need that, but the dependents that rest on this one need the mechanism, so narrowing would free nothing downstream.