When we attempt to define life, we tend to refer to individuals, those that are alive. But these individuals might be cells, organisms, colonies… ecosystems? We can describe living systems at different scales. Which ones might be the best ones to describe different selves? I explore this question using concepts from information theory, ALife, and Buddhist philosophy. After brief introductions, I review the implications of changing the scale of observation, and how this affects our understanding of selves at different structural, temporal, and informational scales. The conclusion is that there is no single “best” scale for a self, as this will depend on the scale at which decisions must be made. Different decisions, different scales.

In this presentation, I refer to a paper (Lopes, 2019) in which I discuss the idea of personhood, or one's sense of self, in relation to advanced meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Focusing on accounts of laboratory experiments on two advanced meditators, I look at the circulation of cultural products derived from these experiments in popular media to explore how they can impact our understandings of what it means to be human and point to the idea of the plasticity of personhood .

Developments in cognitive science, AI, and artificial life force us to consider minds and intelligences that are different from human minds. The dominant contemporary metaphor for any kind of mind is based on an understanding of the human brain and human experience, both of which frequently presuppose a notion of self. In some disciplines, including Buddhism, contemporary philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, much debate has focused on the nature of the self, and one insight from all these domains is that while we are strongly attached to notions of stable selves, it is also possible to conceive of selves as dynamic, interconnected, and illusory. We suggest that an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on fields with well-developed models of self in relation to agency, can offer new insights. We suggest that the view of self as illusory, and awareness of this illusion, in both human and non-human minds, may augment and qualitatively change the agent's affordances, or range of possible actions.