THEORY-1117: Ainslie proposes that self-control over time needs no faculty of will: hyperbolic discounting makes preferences that dominate at different delays, these grow into interests that bargain with no governor above them, and resolve is the recursive staking of expected future choices on the present one

Source

Ainslie (2005), Précis of Breakdown of Will, LIT-586, read in full in NOTE-443: all twelve sections, the notes and the references. The figures and formulas did not survive extraction and are described from the prose. The book, LIT-583, and the BBS commentaries are unread. Schelling (LIT-602), THEORY-067’s second source, is not part of this entry: he describes the phenomena and proposes no mechanism.

The proposal

Vertebrates discount delayed reward roughly hyperbolically, so a smaller, sooner reward is preferred in the period just before it is due and dispreferred from a distance. The preferences that dominate at different delays grow into “interests”, each selected by one kind of reward over one time range and surviving by forestalling the others. They “are not options chosen by an overarching ego, the top down model”. Stable choice “has to be achieved as it is in the kind of markets that don’t have governors”, and the person is “just the resultant” of the interests. Perceiving a choice as a predictor of later ones bundles the series, and summed hyperbolic curves favour the larger, later rewards. A lapse lowers the credibility of the rule: “Will, in short, is a bargaining situation, where credibility is power.” Against an organ of will the précis asks “What keeps this strength from being co-opted by the bad option?”

So the proposal places the integration of choice over time in bargaining among interests, with no specifier above them. CLAIM-159 uses that placement: it puts this account in the aggregate or emergent cell of the drive profile.

What this does not say

It does not say the proposal is true. The précis “is a theoretical synthesis”. Its cited experiments impose bundling from outside, and it concedes the mechanism is “hard to study directly by controlled experiment”. The tests are THEORY-067’s promote_when, and THEORY-067 stays Proposed until the record holds them. Nor does this entry hold Schelling’s description, or the predicted costs of will (legalism, lapse districts), which the précis fits to clinical observation.