Post #1: The Instantaneous Nature of Self

Some technicalities behind the continuity of consciousness

Standard lame reading from me:

Last updated: March 16, 2025

Excellent “deep dive” from NotebookLM, included May 17, 2025:

Hello and welcome to my first post! The best place to actually begin however should be my “About” page. There I went into my general journey and how I posit the need for radical change in academia, though mainly to help improve the weakest areas of science. It’s a brief story that began with youthful disappointment that mental and behavioral forms of science were not yet founded upon the premise that feeling good/bad constitutes the value of existing (that is except for the successful science of economics where I earned a degree). I proposed that in order for mental and behavioral sciences in general to develop highly effective models of our nature, that they’d require such a value premise from which to build. Furthermore I proposed that science in general would need a respected community of professionals which has the sole purpose of providing accepted metaphysical and epistemological principles from which to work, beyond just the axiological.

For this post I’ll get things going with a practical but basic description of our nature. Notice that technically a given self (such you at this moment) can only exist in an instantaneous present capacity — you can never reside in the future or past but only in the now. The issue here is that for effective survival, evolution must have needed us to also be concerned about future and past circumstances. So given that only the present self can ever exist each moment, how might it have worked this out?

There are two essential instruments that evolution seems to have used regarding the future, and they vary by working in opposing directions. I’m referring to an incentive called “hope” and a punishment called “worry”. Notice that when you identify reasonable ways to potentially help yourself become more happy in the future, working to those ends should bring you a hope that feels good in the present. Theoretically this hope motivates us to do things for the benefit of the future people that we eventually become. For example, consider a perceived opportunity to make good money with a project that seems quite doable. Acting to this end should thus feel good presently by means of your hope of indeed making that money. (Of course if you later realize that it wasn’t actually a good plan then the project could instead feel quite frustrating rather than hopeful. In ignorance however even false hope can be quite motivating.)

Beyond hope there is its opposite, or worry. Worry results when we have credible suspicions that our futures will instead be worse in certain ways, and so this tends to feel bad presently. For example given new evidence that your neighborhood is unsafe, you might worry that your kids are in danger. Such worries should tend to be punishing by making you feel bad presently in that way. The more worry that you feel about this, the more incentive you should have to find a solution to thus diminish how negative you feel presently in this sense. So yes, I’m saying that even working for the safety of your kids, should in a psychological sense be something that you do to personally feel better. Such reductions are needed to test the accuracy of my founding premise that feeling good/bad constitutes the value of existence for anything, anywhere. But the point here is that we’re only interested in how good/bad we feel in the moment, and yet tend to also invest in our futures given both the hope that we feel presently, and to reduce the worry that we feel presently.

If hope and worry bond the present self with potential future selves, then what might connect the present self with past selves? This is generally referred to as “memory”. Psychologists identify several kinds of memory though I won’t get into any specifics varieties for now. The general theme however is that memory exists as a condensed or crippled form of past consciousness that can be used in the present. In practice memory can be quite important. When we’re trying to do something we generally need to both remember what that happens to be, as well as how such things are done. Also observe that the most significant people in our lives can essentially become lost to us when we forget who they are, as Alzheimer’s disease can display. My basic point however is that while self must inherently exist presently, memory of the past and hope/worry about the future effectively bond these separate selves to constitute a relatively unified consciousness over time.

In the past it’s been difficult for me to present ideas like this individually, and maybe because my ideas regarding our nature all work together as a single unified whole. How might I effectively explain one element if I haven’t also explained various complementary elements? I’ll try to remain patient with this however since all good explanations about how things work should connect back to countless related elements. It should become more clear how this particular model fits in with the whole as more pieces are added to the general picture.

If it’s true however that the value of existing is determined by the goodness to badness of what’s felt instantaneously each moment, then perhaps next time I should get into the concept of value in itself? What’s the difference between “valuable existence” versus “non-valuable existence”? If academia has mainly been stymied by axiology so far, a simple explanation initially about my answer should be appropriate. So let’s get into that next time…

(On the art, it’s just modern AI. I asked a chat GPT for artwork associated with “the instantaneous nature of self”. It said this:

The instantaneous nature of the self can be represented through an image of a fleeting moment: perhaps a drop of water falling into a still pond, creating ripples that quickly fade. The drop is both unique and transient, representing how the self constantly shifts and evolves in the present moment, never static but always in flux. Similarly, the ripples fade away, emphasizing the impermanence of the self—ever-present but never fixed.

Wow! So I pasted that in the image generator and this was one choice. It’s all way better than I could do myself!)

(Also on the NotebookLM podcast that I included May 17, 2025, this would be my second experiment with it, and like what it produced for my third post, I’m extremely impressed! So I’ll now cross my fingers and see what happens when I upload the text from my second post too.)