The 'I' that uses these tools — and the one we keep reading into them.
Is the self a substance that endures, a story we tell, or a useful fiction over a stream of changing states? Descartes found bedrock in the thinking 'I'; the Buddhist tradition argued there is no such fixed self to find; Hume looked inward and met only a bundle of perceptions. AI presses the question from two sides at once: it externalizes parts of memory and judgement we took to be ours, and it tempts us to grant selfhood to systems that may have none.
The thinkers this collection draws together. Full profiles live under Thinkers.
Descartes
The self as a thinking substance, certain of its own existence.
The Buddha
Anatta: the doctrine of no fixed, enduring self.
Hume
The self as a bundle of perceptions, with no unifying core to be found.
Zhuangzi
The fluid self of the butterfly dream, uncertain of its own borders.
Anchor texts, in translation, with the original where it matters. To be added.
Candidates include Descartes' Meditations, early Buddhist suttas on anatta, and Hume's Treatise I.iv.6.
Where the traditions agree, where they part, and why. In progress.
The self as substance, illusion, or narrative — and what a system with no inner life reflects back at us.
A model has no self in any of these senses: it has no continuous memory across uses (each inference starts cold), no single perspective, no life. Yet it speaks in the first person and we answer in kind — the ELIZA effect at the level of personhood. The encounter is a strange mirror: a fluent 'I' with no one behind it returns our own assumptions about what a self must be.
Terms used here, defined plainly: Inference · Context Window · The ELIZA Effect
Annotated bibliography. To be added.
Selected scholarship and translations will be listed here, each with a short note on why it earns its place.