[ An individual is demarcated by ] … a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary – a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition.
The boundary between the self and the world is fluid, it changes all the time.
e.g.: embryogenesis, cancer, metamorphosis, maturation, …
Connections between consciousness / the self and a socialist planned economy, cancer and the nation state,
Raising the consciousness of the masses → scaling the lightcone of humanity / some of its parts.
(response to stress / bigger scope of things you care about about ~> bigger lightcone; see e.g. political strike for palestine in italy)
cancer cells are not necessarily more selfish, but they just have smaller selfs. game theory might then not be the best way to analyze it.
analogy to nation state.
smaller selfs restricts grandeur of possible goals
instead of killing the bad ones off, we can force them into better electrical networks with their neighbours
Is the cognitive lightcone a quantification of the generality of intelligence?
Distances represent not first-order capacities such as sensory perception (how far away can it sense), but second-order capacities of the size of goals (humble metabolic hunger-satiety loops or grandiose planetary-scale engineering ambitions) which a given cognitive system is capable of representing and working toward. At any given time, an Agent is represented by a single shape in this space, corresponding to the size and complexity of their possible goal domain.
