Tag: Diachronic Self

Refining Transductive Subjectivity

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, language, maths, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, postmodernism, psychology, reality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I risk sharing this prematurely. Pushing the Transductive Subjectivity model toward more precision may lose some readers, but the original version still works as an introductory conversation.

Please note: There will be no NotebookLM summary of this page. I don’t even want to test how it might look out the other end.

Apologies in advance for donning my statistician cap, but for those familiar, I feel it will clarify the exposition. For the others, the simple model is good enough. It’s good to remember the words of George Box:

All models are wrong; some are useful.

The Simple Model

I’ve been thinking that my initial explanatory model works well enough for conversation. It lets people grasp the idea that a ‘self’ isn’t an enduring nugget but a finite sequence of indexed states:

S0→S1→S2→…→SnS₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ

The transitions are driven by relative forces, RR, which act as catalysts nudging the system from one episode to the next.

The Markov Model

That basic picture is serviceable, but it’s already very close to a dynamical system. More accurate, yes—though a bit more forbidding to the casual reader – and not everybody loves Markov chains:

Si+1=F(Si,Ri)S_{i+1} = F(S_i, R_i)

Here:

  • SiSi is the episodic self at index i
  • RiRi is the configuration of relevant forces acting at that moment
  • FF is the update rule: given this self under these pressures, what comes next?

This already helps. It recognises that the self changes because of pressure from language, institutions, physiology, social context, and so on. But as I noted when chatting with Jason, something important is still missing:

SiSi isn’t the only thing in motion, and RiRi isn’t the same thing at every step.

And crucially, the update rule FF isn’t fixed either.

A person who has lived through trauma, education, and a cultural shift doesn’t just become a different state; they become different in how they update their states. Their very ‘logic of change’ evolves.

To capture that, I need one more refinement.

The Transductive Operator Model

This addresses the fact that Si isn’t the only aspect in motion and there are several flavours of R over time, so Ri. We need to introduce the Transductive T:

(Si+1,Fi+1)=T(Si,Fi,Ri)(S_{i+1}, F_{i+1}) = \mathcal{T}(S_i, F_i, R_i)

Now the model matches the reality:

  • SS evolves
  • the pressures RR evolve
  • and the update rule FF evolves

RiRi can be further decomposed as Ri=(Rphys,Rsocial,Rsymbolic,…)Ri=(R^{phys},R^{social},R^{symbolic},…), but I’ll save that for the formal essay.

The self is not simply ‘what comes next’, but a rule that keeps rewriting itself as it encounters the world.

That is why this is transductive rather than inductive or deductive:
structure at one moment propagates new structure at the next.

What Transductive Subjectivity Isn’t

What TS rejects is the notion that the self is a summation of the SiSis and other factors; this summation is a heuristic that works as a narrative, and all of its trappings, but it is decidedly incorrect.

Self≠Σ(Si,…)Self≠Σ(Sᵢ, …)

Effectively,

Self≠∫0tExperiencedtSelf ≠ \int_{0}^{t} Experience \, dt

In ordinary life, we talk as if there were a single, stable self that sums all these episodes. Transductive Subjectivity treats that as a convenient narrative, not an underlying fact. For example, someone raised in a rigid environment may initially update by avoiding conflict; after therapy and a cultural shift, they may update by seeking it out when something matters. This fiction is where we project agency and desert, and where we justify retribution.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Perceptual Realism in Film

Posted in art, identity, language, perception, philosophy, psychology, technology, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I watched this video so you don’t have to.

Video: Why Movies Just Don’t Feel “Real” Anymore

Only teasing. It reads as pejorative unless you catch the self-inflicted mockery baked in. This chap Tom has for film what I seem to have for language: an alarming degree of enthusiasm paired with the creeping suspicion that most of civilisation is determined to ruin the very medium we love.

I don’t actually share his fondness for film, mind you. I merely recognise the feral passion. What pulled me into this clip wasn’t cinema but dissection. The language of his breakdown dropped me neatly into my natural habitat.

I seldom watch films, television, or whatever corporate imagination-by-committee is calling itself these days. Besides being an outrageous time-sink, Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t just hold; it’s juiced up as if someone ran it through a cheap VFX plug-in. The decline in visual quality Tom describes feels depressingly familiar.

A similar aesthetic rot crept in during the digital audio shift of the ’80s. Vast new possibilities, yes, but a certain grain, a certain breath, went missing. I remember an engineering mate in ’84 being asked to record a well-known jazz artist using Sony’s shiny new digital system. He refused on technical principle, writing a blistering hand-delivered letter explaining why the end result would sound worse. He was right, of course. The label didn’t care, of course. And he walked.

The problem then resembles the problem now. Most people aren’t experiencing media in the environment it was built for. We consume films on phones, tablets, monstrous living-room billboards, or, in my case, a knackered 32-inch monitor. Half the audience barely looks at the screen anyway. They want distraction, not discernment. Some, like Tom – and to a lesser degree, me – actually notice that something in the visual vocabulary has been quietly amputated.

Perhaps that’s why I avoid the form: the predictability, the shallow craft, the sense that the whole affair is engineered for attention-drifting multitudes rather than people who actually, well, look.

Anyway, the whole point was to share the video. Naturally, I ended up editorialising. I learnt something from it. You might too.

I promise I won’t continue injecting Claude into the conversation, but this is where my brain went as I watched the linked video:

How might the indexicality of Charles Peirce relate to Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity?

Thought Process

This is an interesting philosophical question that connects two different thinkers and concepts. Let me think through this carefully.

Charles Peirce’s indexicality refers to his theory of indexical signs – signs that point to or indicate their objects through a direct, existential connection (like “this,” “here,” “now,” “I”). These are part of his broader semiotics, where he distinguished between icons, indexes, and symbols.

Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity relates to his work on the phenomenology of the self. Strawson distinguishes between “Diachronic” and “Episodic” self-experience. Diachronic individuals experience themselves as continuous over time, with a narrative extending into past and future. Episodic individuals (like Strawson claims to be) experience themselves more in terms of discrete, present-centered episodes, without a strong sense of narrative continuity.

How might these relate?

  1. The indexical “I”: Peirce’s indexicality is crucial for how the “I” functions. The first-person pronoun is paradigmatically indexical – it picks out the speaker/thinker in the moment of utterance. For Strawson’s episodic self, each moment’s “I” might be more purely indexical, pointing to the present subject without necessarily carrying thick narrative continuity.
  2. Temporal indexicals: “Now” is also indexical. Episodic self-experience emphasizes the “now” of experience over temporal extension. The indexical nature of present-tense self-reference might support episodic rather than diachronic self-conception.
  3. Existential connection vs narrative construction: Indexical signs work through direct, causal-existential connection, not through resemblance or convention. Similarly, episodic self-experience might be more immediately indexical (this experience, now) rather than mediated through narrative construction.

This is a sophisticated question that deserves a nuanced response.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics