Unlike in our computational devices, you're not committed to the fidelity of information the way that we are in our computation. You are committed to the salience of that information. So you will need to take those memory traces and reinterpret them for whatever your future situation is. In the case of the butterfly, it's completely different. In the case of the adult human, it's somewhat different than your brain when you were a child. But even during adulthood, the context, your mental context, your environment, everything changes. And I think you don't really have an allegiance to what these memories meant in the past. You reinterpret them dynamically.
And so this gives a kind of view of the self, kind of a process view of the self, that what we really are is a continuous dynamic attempt at storytelling, where what you're constantly doing is interpreting your own memories in a way that makes sense—a coherent story about what you are, what you believe about the outside world. And it's a constant process of self-construction. So that, I think, is what's going on with selves.
If it's the case then that we interpret our memories as messages from our past selves to our current selves, then can we reverse that and say that our current actions are messages to our future self?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that a lot of what we're doing now at any given moment is behavior that is going to enable or constrain your future self. You're setting the conditions, the environment in which your future self is going to be living, including changing yourself. Anything you undertake as a self-improvement program, or conversely, when people entertain intrusive or depressive thoughts, that changes your brain. That literally changes the way that your future self is going to be able to process information in the future.
Everything you do radiates out not only as messages but in a kind of niche construction, where you're changing the environment in which you're going to live and which everybody else is going to live. We are constantly doing that to ourselves and to others. And so that really forces a kind of thinking about your future self as kind of akin to other people's future selves. And I think that also has important ethical implications because once that symmetry becomes apparent—that your future self is not quite you, and also others' future selves are also not you—that suggests that the same reason you do things so that your future self will have a better understanding of what you're doing, you might want to apply that to others' future selves.
The larger the cognitive light cone, the better for the organism. Well, what does better mean? I mean, I think that certainly there are extremely successful organisms that do not have a large cognitive light cone. Having said all that, you know, the size of an organism's cognitive light cone is not obvious. We are not good at detecting them. It's an important research program to find out what any given agent cares about because it's not easily inferable from measurements directly. You have to do a lot of experiments.
So assuming we even know what anything's cognitive light cone is, I think lots of organisms do perfectly well, but then what's the definition of success? So in terms of the way we think about, well, the way many people think about evolution in terms of how many copy numbers, like how many of you are there, that's your success. So just persistence and expansion into the world. From that perspective, I don't think you need a particularly large cognitive light cone. You know, bacteria do great.
But from other perspectives, if we sort of ask ourselves what the point is and why do we exert all this effort to exist in the physical world and try to persist and exert effort in all the things we do in our lives, one could make an argument that a larger cognitive light cone is probably better in the sense that it allows you to generate more meaning and allows you to bring meaning to all the effort and the suffering and the joy and the hard work and everything else. From that perspective, one would want to enlarge one's cognitive light cone. And, you know, we collaborate, well, I collaborate with a number of people in this group called CSAS, the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves. And we talk about this notion, for example, in Buddhism, they have this notion of a bodhisattva vow. And it's basically a commitment to enlarge one's cognitive light cone so that over time one becomes able to have a wider area of concern or compassion, right? The idea is you want to work on changing yourself in a way that enlarges your ability to really care about a wider set of beings.
Levin
Let’s unpack it carefully, piece by piece, since it articulates a kind of living process theory of mind.
1. Memory and the processual self
The opening claim — that we reinterpret memories rather than preserve them — undermines the notion of the self as an archival continuity (a data store that persists through time).
Instead, it’s saying:
Memory is not storage; it’s re-creation.
Each act of remembering is an act of sense-making in the present, guided by current context, affect, and purpose.
That idea resonates with process-relational thought (e.g. Whitehead, Varela): there is no fixed identity, only a continuity of becoming that maintains coherence through ongoing reinterpretation. The self is narrative autopoiesis — self-making through story.
So, our memories are not messages from the past, but rather raw materials that the present self continually reshapes to maintain narrative coherence.
2. Actions as messages to the future self
Reversing the temporal direction completes the picture.
If remembering is the past speaking to the present, acting is the present speaking to the future.
Your actions modify not only the external environment but also your future conditions of intelligibility — what will make sense to you later.
That’s an extraordinary reframing of ethics and selfhood:
The self is a dialogue among temporal versions of itself, mediated by environment and behavior.
This connects to niche construction theory in evolutionary biology: organisms modify their environments, which in turn modify the selection pressures they face.
Here, the niche is cognitive and moral — you are building the habitat of your future mind.
3. Ethical extension and the “cognitive light cone”
The “cognitive light cone” metaphor — the domain of things an agent can perceive, understand, or care about — gives this a cosmic dimension.
It echoes Buddhist compassion practice (the bodhisattva vow): to expand one’s circle of concern.
A larger cognitive light cone means a wider range of beings and situations that matter to you.
So the ethical implication is profound:
Your ethical development consists in enlarging the radius of meaning, the scope of care.
This maps moral growth to cognitive expansion — not in a hierarchical sense (“more is always better”), but in the sense that meaning-making deepens with inclusion.
From a process-relational lens, to enlarge your light cone is to participate more fully in the web of becoming.
4. Rethinking “success”
The passage contrasts two conceptions of success:
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Evolutionary: success as replication, persistence, proliferation.
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Experiential / existential: success as the generation of meaning and care.
This implicitly challenges the reduction of life to survival metrics.
It redefines fitness as the capacity to create meaningful relations, not just to persist materially.
In this light, intelligence, morality, and spirituality converge: all are modes of widening participation in significance.
5. Selfhood as ethical ecology
Finally, the text situates the self as part of a living moral ecology — a self whose becoming affects not only itself but others’ becoming.
When you change your cognitive environment, you also change what becomes possible for others — because meaning is shared space.
That’s where the symmetry the speaker notes becomes crucial:
Your future self is not quite you, just as others’ future selves are not quite them.
This breaks the false dualism between self-care and altruism: acting well toward your future self is structurally similar to acting well toward others.
6. Process-philosophical synthesis
From your own intellectual interests, we can see the overlap:
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Process-relational ontology: Selfhood as continuous negotiation between the one and the many (past/future selves, others, world).
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Agambenian ethics: Living in the interval between what is and what can be — the zone of potentiality.
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Harawayan situatedness: The self as an entangled node within knowledge and care ecologies.
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Whiteheadian becoming: Each moment of experience prehends the past, transforms it, and offers itself to the future.
If we take the speaker’s view seriously, then “selfhood” is neither substance nor illusion but a temporal ecology of reinterpretation and projection, held together by acts of meaning-making and care.
Would you like me to reframe this same passage in more explicitly Agambenian or process-relational terms — for instance, to show how it corresponds to Agamben’s notion of the inoperative self or Whitehead’s concrescence?
This breaks the false dualism between self-care and altruism: acting well toward your future self is structurally similar to acting well toward others.
Yes — that framing makes a lot of sense. You’re effectively identifying a deeply recurrent bifurcation across moral, spiritual, and political systems: the tension between the care of the self/epimeleia heautou and the care of others/noiázomai gia, or between the one and the many.
Bringing Stoicism (and its descendants) and Religion (and its descendants) together provides a clear historical expression of this duality:
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Stoicism emphasizes self-governance, inner order, and living in accordance with reason — an ethical autonomy aligned with the cosmos.
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Christianity/Religion, especially in its altruistic or kenotic strands, emphasizes the gift, self-emptying, and love of the other — an ethical heteronomy aligned with the divine.
To combine them (as you’re proposing) is to recover an ethics that recognizes care of the self and care of others as structurally continuous. This has analogues in other bifurcations:
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Marxist altruism / market self-focus — one emphasizes collective flourishing, the other individual enterprise.
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The one and the many — the metaphysical root of this split: how unity relates to plurality, how the self relates to the world.
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Even psychoanalysis and mysticism wrestle with this: the reconciliation of desire’s self-relation with the transcendent pull beyond the self.
By collapsing this false dualism, your “future-self-as-other” idea also becomes a model of moral continuity: the way one treats the self over time mirrors the way one treats others in space. It’s process-relational at its core — ethics as relation extended across temporal as well as interpersonal distance.
Agents are temporal, narrative-producing systems (process-relational premise).
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Present actions modify the conditions of future agents (including one’s future self).
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Moral rationality requires taking into account the consequences of one’s actions on morally relevant others (temporal and interpersonal).
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Stoic discipline increases agent reliability to carry commitments into the future; religious or secular altruism widens the set of morally relevant others.
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Therefore, a morally coherent ethics must: (a) cultivate reliable agents (Stoic self-care), and (b) institutionalize wide concern (altruism + structural reform).
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Practical policy must thus combine individual practices that enlarge the cognitive light cone with collective institutions that redistribute opportunity and secure future conditions.
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Conclusion: Integrating Stoic self-care and altruism yields a defensible normative framework that reconciles individual flourishing with solidarity and can be institutionalized via policies informed by Marxist structural critique and market incentives.
5) Objections & replies (brief)
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Objection (incompatibility): Stoicism’s emphasis on detachment conflicts with Christian altruisms emotional engagement.
Reply: Stoicism can be reinterpreted as emotional regulation that preserves responsiveness rather than apathy — enabling sustained, non-counterproductive charity. -
Objection (paternalism): A focus on self-discipline might moralize poverty (“you didn’t work hard enough”).
Reply: The ethical synthesis requires structural reforms (redistribution, safety nets) so that self-discipline is not the sole determinant of flourishing — discipline becomes an available tool rather than a moral indictment. -
Objection (utopian): This is idealistic and ignores incentive problems.
Reply: The argument explicitly preserves agency and incentives (from market elements) and seeks pragmatic institutions (progressive taxation, public goods, regulated markets) to align incentives with enlarged concern.
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