CIMC X Foresight Institute Salon: Selfhood in Distributed, Self-Organizing Systems
Great questions are best asked in good company. Drawing on the tradition of the philosophy salon, this event - co-hosted by CIMC and Foresight Institute - invites curious thinkers to sit with the mysteries of mind, machines, language, and living matter.
This evening takes up the question of selfhood in distributed, self-organizing systems.
Living organisms, ant colonies, the human brain - all are collectives with no single controller, whose order emerges from many small local interactions. How do they come together to form a single identity and from where does selfhood emerge?
If there's no control center, the self can't be a place. Perhaps it's a process, a pattern that keeps re-drawing its own boundary, holding a "me" apart from everything else.
We'll open with a short framing talk (~15 min) to lay out the terrain - autopoiesis and the self-producing boundary, Markov blankets as a formal edge between inside and outside, Metzinger's idea that the self is just a special part of the world-model we can't recognize as a model, Levin's cell collectives, and the reafference problem of telling apart self-caused change from world-caused change - then we open the floor.
Questions we'll chew on:
If there's no controller, is the self something a system has, or is it a story it tells?
Is a self-model just a special corner of the world-model, or something categorically different in kind?
What is the minimum a system needs before we credit it with a self at all? A single cell? A colony? A simulation?
Is containing an identity the same as selfhood?
Come with your own examples and objections, come curious!