Recursive Selfhood: The Attending Loop
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Two ideas developed independently, Orchestrated Dualism and a note on naming as the origin of entities, produce when combined a distinction neither makes alone: between the survival of a process and the survival of a self. This paper proposes selfhood as an ongoing act rather than a persisting object, a recursive loop of self-attention and self-naming performed on a persisting process. It applies this model to the branching problem in personal identity, locating the fork of selfhood where independent naming loops diverge rather than at the moment a pattern is copied, and offers a carefully bounded hypothesis about depersonalisation.
Author: Hall, Ashlar
Institution: Chemical Synthesis Lab
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221591975
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