Tag: heuristics

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:

$S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ$

The transitions are driven by relative forces, $R$, 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:

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

Here:

• $Si$ is the episodic self at index i
• $Ri$ is the configuration of relevant forces acting at that moment
• $F$ 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:

$Si$ isn’t the only thing in motion, and $Ri$ isn’t the same thing at every step.

And crucially, the update rule $F$ 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 $S_i$ isn’t the only aspect in motion and there are several flavours of $R$ over time, so $R_i$. We need to introduce the Transductive T:

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

Now the model matches the reality:

• $S$ evolves
• the pressures $R$ evolve
• and the update rule $F$ evolves

$Ri$ can be further decomposed as $Ri=(R^{phys},R^{social},R^{symbolic},…)$, 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 $Si$s and other factors; this summation is a heuristic that works as a narrative, and all of its trappings, but it is decidedly incorrect.

$Self≠Σ(Sᵢ, …)$

Effectively,

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.