A longstanding issue in attempts to understand the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics is the origin of the Born rule: why is the probability given by the square of the amplitude? Following Vaidman, we note that observers are in a position of self-locating uncertainty during the period between the branches of the wave function splitting via decoherence and the observer registering the outcome of the measurement. In this period it is tempting to regard each branch as equiprobable, but (...) we argue that the temptation should be resisted. Applying lessons from this analysis, we demonstrate (using methods similar to those of Zurek's envariance-based derivation) that the Born rule is the uniquely rational way of apportioning credence in Everettian quantum mechanics. In doing so, we rely on a single key principle: changes purely to the environment do not affect the probabilities one ought to assign to measurement outcomes in a local subsystem. We arrive at a method for assigning probabilities in cases that involve both classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty. This method provides unique answers to quantum Sleeping Beauty problems, as well as a well-defined procedure for calculating probabilities in quantum cosmological multiverses with multiple similar observers. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving (...) subject. The main aim of this paper is to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, (...) any updating rule that satisfies a few reasonable conditions will have the same feature. The conclusion that fine-tuned life provides evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape. (shrink)

How do temporal and eternal beliefs interact? I argue that acquiring a temporal belief should have no effect on eternal beliefs for an important range of cases. Thus, I oppose the popular view that new norms of belief change must be introduced for cases where the only change is the passing of time. I defend this position from the purported counter-examples of the Prisoner and Sleeping Beauty. I distinguish two importantly different ways in which temporal beliefs can be acquired and (...) draw some general conclusions about their impact on eternal beliefs. (shrink)

Self-locating attitudes and assertions provide a challenge to the received view of mental and linguistic intentionality. In this paper I try to show that the best way to meet this challenge is to adopt relativistic, centred possible worlds accounts for both belief and communication. First, I argue that self-locating beliefs support a centred account of belief. Second, I argue that self-locating utterances support a complementary centred account of communication. Together, these two claims motivate a unified centred conception (...) of belief and communication. (shrink)

We develop a Bayesian framework for thinking about the way evidence about the here and now can bear on hypotheses about the qualitative character of the world as a whole, including hypotheses according to which the total population of the world is infinite. We show how this framework makes sense of the practice cosmologists have recently adopted in their reasoning about such hypotheses.

Self-locating beliefs cause a problem for conditionalization. Miriam Schoenfield offers a solution: that on learning E, agents should update on the fact that they learned E. However, Schoenfield is not explicit about whether the fact that they learned E is self-locating. I will argue that if the fact that they learned E is self-locating then the original problem has not been addressed, and if the fact that they learned E is not self-locating then the theory generates (...) implausible verdicts which Schoenfield explicitly rejects. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that some plausible principles concerning which credences are rationally permissible for agents given information about one another’s epistemic and credal states have some surprising consequences for which credences an agent ought to have in light of self-locating information. I provide a framework that allows us to state these constraints and draw out these consequences precisely. I then consider and assess the prospects for rejecting these prima facie plausible principles.

The epistemology of self-locating belief concerns itself with how rational agents ought to respond to certain kinds of indexical information. I argue that those who endorse the thesis of Time-Slice Rationality ought to endorse a particular view about the epistemology of self-locating belief, according to which ‘essentially indexical’ information is never evidentially relevant to non-indexical matters. I close by offering some independent motivations for endorsing Time-Slice Rationality in the context of the epistemology of self-locating belief.

How should we update our beliefs when we learn new evidence? Bayesian confirmation theory provides a widely accepted and well understood answer – we should conditionalize. But this theory has a problem with self-locating beliefs, beliefs that tell you where you are in the world, as opposed to what the world is like. To see the problem, consider your current belief that it is January. You might be absolutely, 100%, sure that it is January. But you will soon believe (...) it is February. This type of belief change cannot be modelled by conditionalization. We need some new principles of belief change for this kind of case, which I call belief mutation. In part 1, I defend the Relevance-Limiting Thesis, which says that a change in a purely self-locating belief of the kind that results in belief mutation should not shift your degree of belief in a non-self-locating belief, which can only change by conditionalization. My method is to give detailed analyses of the puzzles which threaten this thesis: Duplication, Sleeping Beauty, and The Prisoner. This also requires giving my own theory of observation selection effects. In part 2, I argue that when self-locating evidence is learnt from a position of uncertainty, it should be conditionalized on in the normal way. I defend this position by applying it to various cases where such evidence is found. I defend the Halfer position in Sleeping Beauty, and I defend the Doomsday Argument and the Fine-Tuning Argument. (shrink)

This article defends the Doomsday Argument, the Halfer Position in Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-Tuning Argument, and the applicability of Bayesian confirmation theory to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. It will argue that all four problems have the same structure, and it gives a unified treatment that uses simple models of the cases and no controversial assumptions about confirmation or self-locating evidence. The article will argue that the troublesome feature of all these cases is not self-location but (...) selection effects. (shrink)

One's inaccuracy for a proposition is defined as the squared difference between the truth value (1 or 0) of the proposition and the credence (or subjective probability, or degree of belief) assigned to the proposition. One should have the epistemic goal of minimizing the expected inaccuracies of one's credences. We show that the method of minimizing expected inaccuracy can be used to solve certain probability problems involving information loss and self-locating beliefs (where a self-locating belief of a temporal (...) part of an individual is a belief about where or when that temporal part is located). We analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, the duplication version of the Sleeping Beauty problem, and various related problems. (shrink)

At the phenomenal level, consciousness can be described as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness, consistently coherent in a particualr way; that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain, such that conscious self-awareness is explicitly characterized by I-ness, now-ness and here-ness. The psychological mechanism underwriting this spatiotemporal self-locatedness and its recursive processing style involves an evolutionary elaboration of the basic orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing spatiotemporal self-location computations (...) as i-here-now. Cognition computes action-output in the midst of ongoing movement, and consequently requires a constant self-locating spatiotemporal reference frame as basis for these computations. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged both the proliferation of anticipative feedforward processing mechansims, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive i-here-now processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness. (shrink)

Ross Cameron's The Moving Spotlight argues that of the three most common dynamical theories of time – presentism, the growing block theory and the moving spotlight theory – his version of the MST is the best. This paper focuses on Cameron's response the epistemic objection. It considers two of Cameron's arguments: that a standard version of the MST can successfully resist the epistemic objection, and that Cameron's preferred version of the MST has an additional avenue open to it for resisting (...) the objection, one that is consistent with an appealing account of truthmaking. I argue that neither argument succeeds....By SMST, I shall mean the view that there exists a static four-dimensional block of events such that if an event ever... (shrink)

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show (...) that having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects. (shrink)

Starting from the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, this work gives a holistic view of consciousness. The entirety is complete and does not possess any particular physical properties or subjective experience. It is the superposition of all possibilities. Its partition, however, gives rise to physical properties and subjective experience simultaneously. They play complementary roles to each other. The latter cannot be conveyed to a third person, and cannot be reduced to the former. It in fact fills the informational gap which (...) is impossible for the former to fill. The casual effect and the privilege of subjective experience are related to the role it plays, which is to identify the subject's self location. (shrink)

This paper asks what must be specified before a claim about typical observers or self-locating credence is well posed. It does not propose a uniquely correct cosmological measure; its contribution is a measure-specification problem rather than a measure. The paper first distinguishes six roles often grouped under the word “probability”: dynamical probability, Born weight, empirical frequency, observer selection measure, self-locating credence, and normative trust. These roles are conceptually and type-theoretically distinct, and any identification among them requires an explicit (...) theoretical or interpretive bridge. Third-personal typicality and first-personal self-locating credence are therefore specified separately. History forms the base measure layer within a fixed decoherent-history framework. Observer architectures, observation episodes, observer-moments, record-derived states, and lineages are treated as distinct within-history fiber types. A non-negative measure kernel assigns mass to eligible objects of the selected type, while observer grain, temporal segmentation, reference class, evidential conditioning, null-event conditioning, and infinite-measure regularization are declared as separate components of the specification. The base history measure and the within-history kernel are separately motivated explanatory inputs, and their factorization cannot be recovered from the final observer measure alone. The framework distinguishes causal provenance, veridicality, and channel reliability, and treats provenance prevalence as a diagnostic rather than a normative verdict. It also separates physical branch weight, observer selection measure, and self-locating credence, and relates its self-location bridge to the xerographic-distribution program of Hartle and Srednicki. The paper derives neither the Born rule, nor a unique cosmological measure, nor a theory of rational trust. It supplies a typed specification and a hierarchical family of measure, typicality, and self-location specifications for use in a subsequent account of epistemic self-undermining. (shrink)

The thesis that agents should calibrate their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence—i.e., should adjust their first-order beliefs in response to evidence suggesting that the reasoning underlying those beliefs is faulty—is sometimes thought to be in tension with Bayesian approaches to belief update: in order to obey Bayesian norms, it’s claimed, agents must remain steadfast in the face of higher-order evidence. But I argue that this claim is incorrect. In particular, I motivate a minimal constraint on a reasonable treatment (...) of the evolution of self-locating beliefs over time and show that calibrationism is compatible with any generalized Bayesian approach that respects this constraint. I then use this result to argue that remaining steadfast isn’t the response to higher-order evidence that maximizes expected accuracy. (shrink)

Does the evidence that our universe contains fine-tuned life confirm the multiverse hypothesis? The answer depends on our approach to self-locating beliefs. In a recent paper, Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell (2022) offer two arguments for thinking that such evidence does confirm the multiverse hypothesis. First, they argue that the three leading approaches to self-locating beliefs all entail that such evidence confirms the multiverse hypothesis. Second, they present a pair of theorems showing that any approach to self-locating beliefs (...) that satisfies certain “reasonable” constraints will entail that such evidence confirms the multiverse hypothesis. I argue that Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell’s two arguments are not compelling, the first because they fail to consider some natural approaches to self-locating beliefs, the second because their theorems rely on a suspect premise that we should reject. Contra Issacs, Hawthorne, and Russell, I argue that on a natural approach to self-locating beliefs the evidence that our universe contains fine-tuned life needn’t confirm the multiverse hypothesis. (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism (...) in order to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such cases, (...) which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse. (shrink)

In "Finding oneself in God," I argue that we should understand scientia intuitiva as a “metaphysically locating” thought. Physically locating thoughts are familiar: when I wake up and realize, in a flash, that I am in Berkeley, I connect my felt experiences with a non-perspectival description of a place. The metaphysically locating thought of scientia intuitiva also involves connecting felt experiences to a non-perspectival description. When I enjoy scientia intuitiva, I realize, in a flash, that I am as things are (...) described in the monist system of the Ethics: I am such that I can be understood as a mind or body, as a modification of God’s eternal and infinite reality or as a temporally and spatially limited finite thing. I explain how, if scientia intuitiva is what I think it is, it can be characterized as exploiting, in one intuition, the power of two specific Cartesian intuitions: the cogito and the Fifth Meditation’s ontological argument (with some alterations to the ideas involved, of course). (shrink)

This paper defends a frame account of ipseity. By ipseity I mean the first-personal for-whom structure of coherent appearing: not a hidden observer behind consciousness and not a finite content inside consciousness, but the non-objectual disclosure-frame in which finite contents can appear as present, situated, comparable, and reportable. The argument begins from a distinction between givenness and interpretation. At the level of givenness, experience is disclosed as here, now, and for-whom. At the level of interpretation, that appearing may be fixed (...) to a body, name, biography, social identity, or person-token. The central claim is that such empirical self-fixing is not primitive. It depends on operations of localization and identification that apply only to finite appearances within a field. Temporal localization requires temporal differentiation: retention, protention, recurrence, sequence, contrast, or mnemonic marking by which appearances can be conceived as prior, later, enduring, repeated, or no longer present. Spatial localization requires finite contrast within or across here-now configurations. Identification requires comparison between finite appearances or between finite traces, records, memories, or representations. These operations make contents localizable and identifiable; they do not make the field of appearing itself into one more bounded content. Since ipseity is the for-whom structure of the here-now field, not an appearance inside it, ipseity cannot be localized or identified by the same operations that it frames. This yields the principle of non-excessive self-presence: no first-person determination attributable to ipseity exceeds what is disclosed within the here-now field in which ipseity is operative. The principle blocks the reification of ipseity into a hidden witness that would possess absolute self-coordinates unavailable to experience. The paper further develops a verification asymmetry: the other's verification of my "I am'' is content-supervenient, while minimal self-verification is structure-supervenient. Others verify the empirical person through body, speech, behavior, records, traces, and social recognition; self-givenness verifies ipseity through the immediate structure of coherent appearing itself. This also clarifies death and absence: the third-person frame can register the death or absence of the empirical person, but the first-person frame cannot encounter its own non-being as an experience. The resulting gauge claim remains epistemic rather than ontological. Absolute embedding may exist and may be recovered by third-person methods, but it is not given from within ipseity as an absolute self-coordinate. We formalize this by introducing world-parameters, frame-parameters, passive co-transformations, and first-person report maps. Under phenomenological extensionality and a no-beacon condition, report maps are invariant under phenomenally silent passive co-transformations. With parametric sufficiency, reportables factor through the reachable orbit space (S × F)/G. The paper concludes that empirical "I''-talk functions as coordinate-fixing over a more primitive first-personal invariance, while ordinary de~se indexicality remains intact. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, one’s own location can be among the things that visual experience represents, even when one’s body is entirely out of view. By contrast, the Minimal View denies this, and says that visual experience represents things only as "to the right", etc., and never as "to the right of me". But the Minimal View is phenomenologically inadequate: it cannot explain the difference between a visual experience of self-motion and one of an oppositely (...) moving world. To show this, I argue (i) that these experiences are different in an important respect, (ii) that this difference is genuinely experiential, (iii) that it is visual, (iv) that it is not purely phenomenal, and (v) that it cannot be identified with anything other than the apparent motion of the self. So the Self-Location Thesis is upheld: reports of one’s own motion can correspond to aspects of visual experiences every bit as basic to their contents as the apparent motion or rest of the things one has in view. (shrink)

According to one tradition in the philosophy of language and mind, the content of a psychological attitude can be characterized by a set of possibilities. On the classic version of this account, advocated by Hintikka (1962) and Stalnaker (1984) among others, the possibilities in question are possible worlds, ways the universe might be. Lewis (1979, 1983a) proposed an alternative to this account, according to which the possibilities in question are possible individuals or centered worlds, ways an individual might be. The (...) motivation for the centered worlds theory has primarily to do with self-locating – or de se – attitudes. The focus of this paper is on the less-discussed question of how other-locating – or de re – attitudes ought to be treated within this framework. Most advocates of what we might call the modal approach to attitudes, Stalnaker and Lewis included, offer some kind of descriptivist solution to the well-known problems that other-locating attitudes raise. There are intramural differences between Stalnaker, Lewis, and other modal theorists (e.g. two-dimensionalists) on a number of issues: on the precise nature of the descriptivism involved, how attitude content relates to the asserted content of the sentences we utter, and on the proper semantic treatment of attitude reports. I pass over these differences to focus on a problem common to these various approaches: all face a problem when it comes to characterizing the contents of counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing. (shrink)

One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from elsewhere. A promising explanation introduces a special cosmological initial condition, now called the Past Hypothesis: the universe started in a low-entropy state. Unfortunately, in a universe where there are many copies of us (in the distant ''past'' or the distant ''future''), (...) the Past Hypothesis is not enough; we also need to postulate self-locating (de se) probabilities. However, I show that we can similarly use self-locating probabilities to strengthen its rival---the Fluctuation Hypothesis, leading to in-principle empirical underdetermination and radical epistemological skepticism. The underdetermination is robust in the sense that it is not resolved by the usual appeal to 'empirical coherence' or 'simplicity.' That is a serious problem for the vision of providing a completely scientific explanation of time's arrow. (shrink)

This paper isolates a common spectral grammar behind three Millennium Problems which, in their classical formulations, appear to belong to different worlds. Each problem is associated with a shadow-symmetric spectral datum: a Hilbert space, an involution exchanging two spectral half-planes, and a fixed self-dual interface. For the Riemann zeta-function the interface is the critical line Re(s) = 1/2; for an elliptic L-function the interface is the central point s = 1; for Yang-Mills the interface separates the vacuum from the (...) positive-mass spectrum. Given such a datum, exactly three primitive spectral questions arise: whether all spectral support lies on the interface (location); what multiplicity the interface carries at a distinguished point (multiplicity); and whether the positive spectrum is separated from zero (exclusion). In the Shadow framework, the Riemann Hypothesis, Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer, and the Yang-Mills mass gap are the arithmetic, elliptic, and gauge-theoretic realizations of these three questions. The paper proves the abstract spectral trichotomy, identifies each classical problem with its spectral role, and maps the common Haar positivity mechanism underlying all three. The purpose is not to compress the dedicated proofs into a single argument, but to explain why the three problems belong to one spectral family: RH fixes location, BSD computes multiplicity, and Yang-Mills proves exclusion. (shrink)

Our universe seems to be miraculously fine-tuned for life. Multiverse theories have been proposed as an explanation for this on the basis of probabilistic arguments, but various authors have objected that we should consider our total evidence that this universe in particular has life in our inference, which would block the argument. The debate thus crucially hinges on how Bayesian background and evidence are distinguished and on how indexical or demonstrative terms are analysed. The aim of this article is to (...) take a step back and examine these various aspects of Bayesian reasoning and how they affect the arguments. The upshot is that there are reasons to resist the fine-tuning argument for the multiverse, but the “this-universe-objection” is not one of them. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness in the autonomy and enactive tradition hold that mattering enters the world with life: a self-producing system is the bearer of its own norms, and its own continuation is genuinely at stake for it. A philosopher who grants this for-itself has, by that grant, conceded almost the whole of a constitutive account of consciousness, so that any remaining disagreement has a single location. The ascent from the bare living cell to the reflective human mind contains (...) exactly one categorically distinct transition: the passage from mattering that is not felt to mattering that is felt. Below that onset lies the for-itself the realist already affirms; above it, subjectivity, the explicit self, and the cultural mind are the elaboration of a felt life rather than a second break, so that what appears to be several independent fronts of resistance is one. At the onset the constitutive account claims that feeling is what a self-maintaining, time-binding system is from within — a claim that dissolves the explanatory gap for those who accept it and is declined, at that one joint, by those who do not. The contribution is not to close the gap but to locate it: for the teleology-realist, the entire disagreement reduces to a single identity at a single threshold. (shrink)

The notion of a mental interior has been derided as a Cartesian relic, the 'ghost in the machine' (Ryle, 1963). Yet there is a mental interior — indeed, there are two — only not where we tend to look. When a toddler talks to herself before sleep, she often plays the part of a parent toward herself, mitigating the dread of separation. She thus creates a pretend space between herself-as-parent and herself-as-child. Growing up, she plays others toward herself as well. (...) She and her simulated interlocutors are experienced by her as an expanded self with an inside, namely the place of inner speech. This pretend space is the first non-bodily interior. The second develops as a consequence. The simulated others diminish the dependence on actual others, who therefore cease to appear in their former importance. One yearns for them as they were, but the yearning is blocked — and banished from awareness — by dread of reverting to the earlier dependence. This second interior is the space between the unconscious self and the full kind of other for whom it yearns. The yearning enters conscious life indirectly and unthreateningly, for example in the fictive frame of art and in the relational frame of conversation. (shrink)

The Riemann Hypothesis is a determinate Pi-0-1 imprint over the standard naturals, one truth-value fixed by the primes, and it is hard for a reason that is not intrinsic to it. Three things were dressed onto it, the archimedean metric tokens, the transcendental staging, and completed infinity, and each dressing is a wall. Strip the removable dressing, the metric tokens of the first, and the continuum staging of the third, and what remains is a flat quantifier over the naturals, decidable (...) at every instance, whose only genuine open content is the multiplicative correlation carried on the Euler product. The completed infinity in particular is recent, roughly a hundred and fifty years old against the twenty-three centuries that refused it, and adopting it lifted the flat countable domain up into Cantor's continuum tower, the burned costume, which is where the apparent room to doubt was manufactured. The tower is real as a reach and empty as a foundation, and RH never quantified over it. The proof that a clean object was buried is the function-field analogue, where none of the three dressings exists and RH is a theorem. This edition establishes further that the fold register is eliminated by theorem and not by survey and is two-sidedly sharp by Hamburger's converse, the fold alone separating nothing and the fold with the exact archimedean factor and Dirichlet growth forcing uniqueness outright; that the barrier ledger gains two blocks, a quantified finite channel whose blindness horizon is computed rather than asserted, the crossing index exceeding the reciprocal-rate reading by factors of twenty to sixty-nine, and a self-referential block exhibiting that the natural positivity lemma at the aperture is the hypothesis in costume; and that the actualized-invariant seal now carries formal fortification from two new independent data, the unitary structure of the multiplicative half-line, exact on the critical line in both its conservation and spectral faces, and the unimodularity of the Li multiplier on the perpendicular bisector of the two poles the completion cancels, the three electing data identified as one classical generator, the theta inversion, read at three registers. The object then carries the same three-face verdict it carried before. Sealed as an actualized invariant on the kinetic prime field, where the distribution rests on the fixed line and the critical line is its unique stable attractor. Not an open problem but a closed geometry with an unbuilt arithmetic, unbuilt rather than open in the sense of section 7.4 and not formally decided, the formulation space closed as one equivalence class with the deciding requirement formulation-invariant and stated, now sharpened to a single coordinate, the uniformity of a positivity modulus across all finite sets of primes, whose semilocal instances are constructed in the literature, the sufficient construction at the necessary place. And the math road blocked, the barred channels barred by named witnesses and by classification, the after-image channel a restatement at structural grade, and on the coupled cord readings no non-decider known and nothing built. On the arithmetic string the instrument locks the shape and is orientation-blind to the truth-sign, so it carries terminal suspension, a sealed resolution boundary and not the open question the field expects to one day close. Every result that decides a truth-directed question has decided toward residence and none against, and the root is invariant under the resolution in every direction. (shrink)

A central dispute in discussions of self-locating attitudes is whether attitude relations like believing and knowing are relations between agents and properties (things that vary in truth value across individuals) or between agents and propositions (things that do not so vary). Proponents of the proposition view have argued that the property view is unable to give an adequate account of relations like communication and agreement. We agree with this critique of the property view, and in this essay we show (...) that the problems facing the property view are much more serious than has been appreciated. We then develop and explore two versions of the proposition view. In each case, we show how facts about the self-ascription of properties may be determined by facts about propositional attitudes in conjunction with certain other facts. (shrink)

Perception is routinely treated as the interface between the individual and the world. This paper argues it is also something else: the channel between two layers of the self that do not have equal access to awareness. The ego—the narrative, presented self—is not the deepest layer of what a person is. Beneath it sits the accumulated self: every experience admitted, every threat learned, every signal that hardened into expectation and prior. The accumulated self is not a (...) filter behind perception. It is the constraint structure perception operates under. What this paper calls the gate of perception is not upstream of perceiving—it is what perceiving is, for that self, in that moment: classifying, weighting, and routing incoming signal before the ego receives anything at all. This paper proposes a structural account of that directional channel. It distinguishes the ego from the accumulated self, locates perception as the interface between them, and shows that the channel runs in both directions. The reflective person can interrogate the gate and gain structural insight into what the accumulated self has become. The unreflective person is directed and directing without knowing it. Three implications follow: the structure of genuine insight (eureka as accumulated resolution surfacing), directed self-formation (ego as directional authorization, accumulated self as the layer that actually reorganizes), and the limits of conscious defense against accumulation-layer influence. A key structural prediction: when ego-level belief change is declared, perceptual salience and credibility routing will often remain measurably out of sync until the accumulated self has actually reorganized—and if that lag is not observable, the structural claim made here is disconfirmed. This is not a theory of consciousness. It is a structural account of the relationship between two layers of self—and of what perception is actually moving between them. More broadly, the paper aims to make ordinary ego-experience more intelligible: to explain why reactions feel immediate and self-generated, why declared belief and felt salience so often diverge, and why what presents as self-authored judgment is frequently already structured before conscious reasoning begins. (shrink)

David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self-locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benefits of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commitments of the theories that (...) employ them. In addition, my investigation shows that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his. (shrink)

The domain of phenomenological investigation delineated by the Husserlian term authentic empathy presents us with an immediate tension. On the one hand, authentic empathy is supposed to grant the subject access (in some sense that remains to be fully specified) to the Other’s experience. On the other hand, foundational phenomenological considerations pertaining to the apprehension of a foreign subjectivity determine that it is precisely a disjunction in subjective processes that is constitutive of the Other being other. In my approach to (...) this problem, I seek, within the context of a reading of Edith Stein’s work On the Problem of Empathy, to clarify the place of ascription in authentic empathy, and to render more explicit a certain notion of “contiguity” that I take to be informing Stein’s understanding of the co-givenness of the Other’s mental life. I go on to argue that a resolution to the problem of empathy lies in the idea that the respective lived experiences of self and Other are, as a matter of descriptive fact, phenomenally connected by a relation of resemblance, and that, consonantly, the essential structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to picture consciousness. (shrink)

Two lines of investigation into the nature of mental content have proceeded in parallel until now. The first looks at thoughts that are attributable to collectives, such as bands' beliefs and teams' desires. So far, philosophers who have written on collective belief, collective intentionality, etc. have primarily focused on third-personal attributions of thoughts to collectives. The second looks at de se, or self-locating, thoughts, such as beliefs and desires that are essentially about oneself. So far, philosophers who have written (...) on the de se have primarily focused on de se thoughts of individuals. This paper looks at where these two lines of investigations intersect: collective de se thoughts, such as bands' and teams' beliefs and desires that are essentially about themselves. There is a surprising problem at this intersection: the most prominent framework for modeling de se thoughts, the framework of centered worlds, cannot model a special class of collective de se thoughts. A brief survey of this problem's solution space shows that collective de se thoughts pose a new challenge for modeling mental content. (shrink)

Do recent advances in reasoning with self-locating evidence defeat the "this-universe objection" to fine-tuning arguments for a multiverse? Philosophers such as Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell have argued that they do, claiming that on any plausible rule for updating on self-locating evidence, the statement "I exist in a fine-tuned universe" confirms the multiverse hypothesis. I argue that such approaches obscure the distinction between the evidential import of this universe's existence and that of its fine-tuning. To advance the debate, I (...) develop a general formal framework that models both de se ("I") and demonstrative (e.g. "this universe") evidence. I provide a general proof that any rule for reasoning with such information that respects a plausible principle of indifference entails that the fine-tuning of this universe provides no positive, independent support for a multiverse. (shrink)

This paper isolates a symmetry result about first-person individuation under perfect phenomenal duplication. If two experiential events share identical phenomenal character—and, in a strengthened version, share all uncentered publicly specifiable correlates—nothing in the shared phenomenal profile can privilege one instance as uniquely mine. Any determinate self-location fact therefore requires an external index not carried by phenomenal character itself. I present the result as the First-Person Symmetry Lemma, supply a proof-style argument and a centered-world gloss, and address objections including (...) type/token conflation, spacetime individuation, token-reflexive semantics, haecceitism, and phenomenal mineness. The upshot is a principled boundary: even maximally complete uncentered description can underdetermine centered individuation in idealized duplication cases. (shrink)

Current cosmological models—primarily inflationary theory, Many-Worlds quantum cosmology, and multiverse scenarios—introduce profound contradictions regarding entropy evolution, probability conservation, and observer self-location. Inflation requires fine-tuned initial conditions, violating thermodynamic constraints. Many-Worlds and multiverse models collapse probability into redundancy, making prediction impossible. These approaches fundamentally fail to provide a self-consistent, empirical framework for cosmic structure formation. I propose Adaptive Coherence Cosmology (ACC) as a stochastic, coherence-regulated alternative that replaces inflation with a probabilistic selection process, where coherence gradients guide structure (...) formation rather than arbitrary quantum fluctuations. Instead of assuming infinite universes or externally imposed fine-tuning, ACC introduces coherence selection as the fundamental organizing principle, ensuring that entropy remains bounded, causal structure is preserved, and quantum-to-classical transitions follow self-organizing selection processes. This framework eliminates the measure problem in infinite-state cosmologies, prevents unbounded entropy growth, and preserves observer uniqueness. I derive a coherence-weighted evolution equation that replaces the inflation field, resolving both the horizon and flatness problems without violating thermodynamic laws. ACC predicts distinct observational signatures in cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies, galaxy clustering distributions, and black hole entropy scaling. Through computational simulations and empirical tests, ACC provides a falsifiable, finite-state alternative to stochastic inflation and Many-Worlds quantum cosmology. This work establishes a new paradigm for cosmology, where coherence selection, not inflation, governs cosmic evolution. (shrink)

This paper argues that consciousness begins when a system not only evolves within an internal stance space but also carries where it is within that space. Building on the EV/CEM framework, internal organization is modeled through the interaction between an Experiential Vector and a Computational Experiential Manifold, which together describe the system’s evolving position inside a structured internal state space. Within this framework, consciousness is characterized not as a higher-order organizational regime arising when the system’s encoding loop carries a locally (...) updating constraint on its own position and surrounding admissibility structure within the manifold. This self-locating constraint participates directly in the ongoing experiential vector update, shaping subsequent decoding and system evolution rather than functioning as a separable monitoring process. Four structural conditions are proposed as minimal architectural requirements for this regime: recursive accessibility of internal organization, self-locating representation of manifold position, global integration of local topology across processing, and realization within a single unified circulatory loop. Together these conditions distinguish structural consciousness from systems whose internal differentiation remains consequential yet non-reflexive. The account connects with higher-order, self-model, predictive-processing, and global-workspace approaches while grounding their central insights in manifold geometry rather than broadcast architectures, proposition-like representations, or free-energy formalism. It does not resolve the hard problem of consciousness; rather, it specifies the minimal architectural conditions under which the phenomenal question becomes structurally well-posed for both biological and artificial systems. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper develops and advocates a rule for assigning self-locating credences in quantum branching scenarios, called Indexed Branch-Counting. It is argued that Indexed Branch-Counting can be justified on both accuracy-theoretic grounds and on the grounds that it satisfies a requirement of exchangeability for probability assignments. Since Indexed Branch-Counting diverges from the Born Rule, this poses trouble for Everettian approaches to probability. The paper also addresses a common argument against branch-counting, namely that the rule is incoherent in light of (...) putative vagueness in the number of branches. Finally, the paper addresses a recent proposal from Simon Saunders that aims to reconcile branch-counting with the Born Rule, arguing that the proposal faces challenges. (shrink)

Perfect phenomenal duplication invites a familiar thought: two experiences could match in every phenomenal and structural respect and yet still differ in a further first-person fact of which one is mine. Work on self-location and centered worlds explains why uncentered description can leave that question open, but it does not by itself decide whether the residual openness reflects an additional internal fact or merely multiple compatible centers. This paper argues that a restricted anti-haecceitist premise settles the issue. Relational (...) individuation (RI) says that once the phenomenal and structural profile of an occurrent experience is fixed, no further internal first-person fact remains that could privilege one perfect duplicate as uniquely mine. I specify the duplicated base, distinguish token multiplicity from presence-individuation and external indexing, and argue that centered-world formalisms are best treated as setup rather than solution. The upshot is a sharper diagnosis of what duplication cases do and do not show in the philosophy of mind. Perfect duplication does not itself reveal a hidden extra first-person fact; that reading requires a primitive asymmetry-maker not contained in the duplicated profile. (shrink)

This is the twelfth paper of a series that redescribes physical reality as a causally consistent history of information updates, and the closing panel of its second triptych - observer, then probability and typicality, then epistemic trust - ordered by dependence. The tenth paper defined a record-bearing observer and established that such an observer's grip on its own records secures their downstream usability but never, with certainty, their upstream provenance (Uchida, 2026j). The eleventh paper specified what must be declared before (...) a claim about typical observers or self-locating credence is well posed, and handed forward a hierarchical specification family together with a diagnostic, the provenance prevalence, explicitly marked as an input and not a verdict, with the cosmological measure, reference class, regulator, and self-location bridge held to be independent inputs rather than consequences of the physics (Uchida, 2026k). This paper supplies the missing normative step: the last arrow of the eleventh paper's chain, from self-locating credence to rational trust in records. Its central object is a reflexive consistency condition - not on a cosmology in isolation, but on a cosmology together with the observer, measure and self-location, process-adequacy, inferential, and normative specifications under which it is evaluated, that is, on a theory-specification package. Four commitments shape the construction. Trust is treated as warrant, the entitlement to use a record-derived state as evidence for its referent, and is analyzed in layers: first-order process adequacy (the evidence was in fact formed through a reliable, causally continuous network free of declared objective exclusions, a layer non-factive about token truth), a reflective adequacy credence (a first-person credence that process adequacy holds), and a reflective entitlement (the warrant proper, the verdict a warrant bridge confers on that credence and on any defeater the observer knows of). The content of evidence is separated from the physical token bundle and formation network a given centre actually carries, since centres that share an apparent evidential content can differ in provenance, reliability, and preservation. Evidence is in general a bundle, and its reliability is an aggregate over a whole evidence network, sensitive to redundancy and common-mode dependence. And the criterion, the Non-Self-Undermining Condition (NSU), demands consistency between theory-support and evidence-entitlement: in any applicable case - one in which the evidential content, under a declared inferential specification, supports the theory - the package must license the use of that evidence. The condition is given in majority, threshold, and admissible-family-robust grades, and is positioned relative to the xerographic-distribution program of Hartle and Srednicki and the cognitive-instability arguments of Albrecht and Sorbo, and Carroll. The paper's scope is deliberately negative and bounded. NSU is necessary, not sufficient: in an applicable case, passing establishes package-relative reflective entitlement under the declared bridge, not process adequacy, and a fortiori not truth, rational acceptance over rivals, or the correct measure (No-Self-Certification); where the content does not support the theory the condition is simply not applicable, not passed. NSU does not refute external-world skepticism, since it governs only the reflective layer and lifts no observer out of the predicament that upstream provenance is never directly verifiable from the inside; a package that, by its own combined specifications, withholds entitlement from its own supporting evidence is not thereby false but cognitively unstable - cognitive instability, not refutation. It does not solve the bootstrapping problem, and it derives neither the credence threshold, the bridges, the correct cosmological measure, nor the Born rule. Its contribution is a typed, layered account of epistemic trust, a formal criterion that filters self-undermining theory-specification packages, and the closure of the second triptych from inside the history, with no view from nowhere to certify records. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind commonly draw a distinction between the personal level – the distinctive realm of conscious experience and reasoned deliberation – and the subpersonal level, the domain of mindless mechanism and brute cause and effect. Moreover, they tend to view cognitive science through the lens of this distinction. Facts about the personal level are given a priori, by introspection, or by common sense; the job of cognitive science is merely to investigate the mechanistic basis of these facts. I argue (...) that this view misrepresents the structure of cognitive-scientific enquiry. Taken at face value, cognitive science makes no commitment to the existence of a distinctive level at which persons or selves appear. Thus, in the age of cognitive science, we should not expect to find the self in an ontologically distinct realm. Instead, we should expect to locate it in cognitive-scientific models themselves. In closing, I indicate likely results of this approach. (shrink)

The making of human consciousness and the question of self-becoming presents a remarkable complication along the continuum of sentient matter. Self-consciousness is an oddity that both unites humans with and differentiates them from other modes of conscious existence. Lambros Malafouris’s evocative proposal is that people are STRANGE, which stands for the process of Situated TRANsactional Genesis, by which self-becoming is realized at the intersection of mind and matter. This book breaks new ground by applying material engagement theory (...) expertly to questions about self-location, the subject-object division, and the nature of self-boundaries. Malafouris argues that self-bounding (the process by which human ways of being are assembled, owned, or else bound to form what we call self or person) is rarely confined to a singular body. Our boundaries shift in response to the changing material environments and our modes of creative material engagement. Moreover, it is the bounding of consciousness that allows the unbounding of human thought and imagination. Self-bounding is the precondition for a borderless mind. Self-bound is thought-unbound. The theoretical upshot is that, rather than conceiving of self-consciousness as internal and ontological distinct from the material world, we must approach it as a continuous process fundamentally codependent with it. (shrink)

This thesis advances a comprehensive formal and philosophical account of de se reference—the distinctive phenomenon by which speakers refer to themselves in an irreducibly first-personal way. I argue that first-person indexicals such as ``I'' are not merely static referential terms that pick out the speaker, but dynamic linguistic devices that can transform the speaker’s own self-conception. Certain utterances of ``I'' function not to describe an already constituted self but to constitute one: they are acts of linguistic self-formation. (...) To capture this, I extend the standard centered-worlds semantics (Lewis 1979; Perry 1979) by introducing a formal parameter representing an agent’s self-state—a structured model of self-representation—and by defining a family of self-update operators that model how particular linguistic acts revise this self-state. This dynamic semantics of self-reference explains classical puzzles surrounding self-locating belief and misidentification by allowing meaning to evolve with self-awareness. Formally, the thesis develops a semantics in which propositions are evaluated not only relative to centered worlds but also relative to self-states that encode agents’ reflexive perspectives. Updates induced by first-person utterances modify both epistemic and self-representational parameters, bridging the gap between propositional content and the lived dynamics of self-understanding. Philosophically, this framework reveals a performative dimension of language that traditional semantics overlooks: to speak first-personally is, in part, to become the self one articulates. Drawing on comparative sources from Confucian and Daoist traditions, I interpret this dynamic of self-updating as a form of self-cultivation through speech, linking analytic philosophy of language with ethical and spiritual theories of transformation. The resulting view situates semantics within a broader theory of agency and moral development, showing that meaning is not only representational but also constitutive of identity. The thesis concludes by exploring implications for first-person authority, the semantics–pragmatics interface, and linguistic justice, arguing that understanding the ``I'' as a site of self-formation enriches both our theory of meaning and our conception of what it is to know oneself. (shrink)

I explore how endurantists are to handle cases of synchronic bi-location, in which a thing bi-locates at a time (such as by time-travel). I argue that endurantists face significant pressure to posit distinct but structurally identical facts (DSIFs), and critique the fragmentalist approach to bi-location in Simon (2018). Both the positive argument and critique are animated by the observation that handling bi-location cases requires perspicuously describing their spatiotemporal and causal structure. Accordingly, the argument proceeds by considering how (...) endurantists are to think about the metaphysics of place and causation, two issues that are important independent of the thesis about DSIFs. (shrink)

In certain problem-solving contexts, people organize their domain through treating themselves as the perceptual and cognitive center of their world. They identify and solve a particular problem from their perspective as a particular agent, with a particular location, at a particular time, in a particular environment. When they do this, they engage in a distinctive kind of agent-centered problem-solving. For many contexts involving intelligent agents, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), a framework for modeling decision-making in uncertain environments unfolding (...) over time, have effectively become a “standard model.” Yet, as these models are ordinarily interpreted, they do not explicitly represent agent- centered problem-solving. Accordingly, to model this type of problem-solving, we begin by extending the standard POMDP framework to de ne “ePOMDPs.” This formalism models how an agent, once it centers itself on a particular self-and-world representation, plans and acts rationally from its own perspective. To capture the way that such agents choose which problem to solve, we build on our ePOMDPs to develop a“meta-ePOMDP” agent within a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We implement meta-ePOMDP agents for two different suites of“centering game” tasks that highlight different aspects of our theory. We nd that our models explain signatures of agent-centered problem-solving not captured by alternative models, in particular, the dif culty of navigating spaces of possible problem representations. We close by suggesting that our model could provide the beginnings of a computational framework for how a person could have a self. (shrink)