Self

THE SELF AS A PROCESS

I do not think there is a permanent inner substance or supernatural soul that exists independently of my body, brain, history, and environment.

What I call myself is a causally continuous process. More specifically, I currently think the relevant self is the process that maintains the architecture capable of producing the lucid subject I describe in Consciousness.

My memories, beliefs, personality, values, preferences, body, relationships, and environment all contribute to that process, but none of those individual pieces has to remain unchanged for the self to continue.

The local process called Arkin is real. It has a body, history, memories, goals, relationships, and its own perspective. Calling it a process does not make individuality meaningless.

I feel something like a background reference line for whether an action fits who I currently am. I suspect that comes from the brain keeping my behavior consistent with my beliefs, not a separate observer. That is my interpretation of the feeling, not an established mechanism.

CAUSED DOES NOT MEAN INAUTHENTIC

Something does not have to originate independently of my environment to genuinely be part of me. My environment changes the system, those changes become incorporated into it, and the resulting system is what I call myself.

I therefore do not think authenticity requires discovering some untouched version of myself underneath outside influence. There probably is no such version.

This matters personally because I have historically found it difficult to identify traits, interests, or actions as uniquely “me” when I can trace how they were produced by my environment. My current position is that tracing the cause does not explain the self away. The causally constructed system is the self.

LUCID CONTINUITY

The continuity that matters to me is the causal continuation of lucid subjecthood.

My memories can change. My personality can change. My values can change. My clarity can increase or decrease dramatically. None of those changes alone creates a new self as long as the same causal process continues to preserve the architecture capable of lucid experience.

This is part of why I preserve older versions of myself on this site. My childhood self and earlier versions of me were not fake selves waiting for the real one to appear. They were earlier states of the same continuing lucid process.

An exact copy could begin with my memories and traits, but it would have its own perspective and causal path. From then on there would be two subjects, not one self experiencing both. I still don’t have a complete account of identity at the boundaries of copying or interruption.

Consciousness / the definition of lucidity →

TEMPORARY SUPPRESSION / PERMANENT LOSS

Temporary unconsciousness does not end the self either. Sleep, anesthesia, or another reversible suppression of lucidity leaves the underlying system capable of returning to the same continuing lucid process.

Biological continuity by itself is not enough.

If the brain were damaged so severely that the architecture capable of lucidity was permanently and irreversibly destroyed, with no reasonable possibility of recovery, I would consider the relevant self to have ended even if the biological organism continued functioning or retained simpler forms of conscious experience.

The organism and its causal chain can continue after the self that previously existed within it is gone.

Morality / status and protections after irreversible loss →

LOCAL PERSPECTIVES / SHARED REALITY

I do not think my conscious perspective is made from something fundamentally separate from the rest of reality. I am one local organization of the same universe everything else belongs to.

This creates an intuition I find difficult to express precisely: conscious beings can be understood as reality becoming locally aware from different positions within itself.

I do not currently mean that the universe necessarily possesses one global mind that simultaneously experiences every perspective as a single subject. I do not have evidence for that.

What I mean is that the underlying reality is shared while conscious perspectives are local. There is no separate substance that makes my perspective fundamentally outside the universe while another perspective is inside it. Each lucid subject is one localized way the same underlying reality is organized into experience.

This is why one perspective-taking question that matters to me is: if there were no privileged attachment to this particular body and I simply occupied another conscious perspective, what would that experience actually be like?

I do not mean that my current self literally transfers into that being. I use the question to remove my attachment to my own perspective and think about what kind of subjectivity actually exists there.

Consciousness / nonhuman experience and suffering →

OTHER PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES

Their experience is another expression occurring within the same reality of which I am an expression. I don’t need this particular perspective to possess every valuable experience for me to regard its existence positively.

This has reduced envy for me. Someone else doing or experiencing something valuable does not mean something has been taken away from my own trajectory. I don’t receive their experience, but I can still be glad it exists.

That is a value I hold, not something shared reality alone proves I must value.

DEATH

I am much more confident about the end of the self than I am about the deeper metaphysics of consciousness.

If the brain irreversibly stops operating in the way required to sustain my lucid subjecthood, then I no longer exist as this self.

Beyond that, I do not currently pretend to know.

There could conceivably be features of reality we do not understand: some higher-dimensional structure, recurrence, a multiverse, a way an entire life is instantiated again, or something I have no conceptual framework for at all.

I currently have no strong evidence that any of those possibilities are true, so I do not build my worldview around them.

Death is still a surprise to me.

I distinguish the end of this self from stronger claims about what consciousness or reality can ever do.

Even when this self ends, nothing about me was ever outside shared reality in the first place. The particular organization producing this perspective can disappear while its matter and causal consequences continue as parts of the larger reality from which it emerged.

Whether some form of conscious perspective can recur beyond that is something I currently leave open.

FINITUDE

I do not think death makes what happens before it less valuable. If anything, I tend to experience finitude as making experiences, relationships, projects, and opportunities more valuable because they are limited.

They do not need to continue forever in order to have existed or mattered.

Meaning / impermanence and value →

WHY I ARCHIVE MYSELF

The record is still curated, but putting it outside my memory and in public makes it harder to invent a cleaner story after the fact.

How this site fits the model →