Recursive Selfhood: The Attending Loop

Two ideas developed independently, Orchestrated Dualism and a note on naming as the origin of entities, produce when combined a distinction neither makes alone: between the survival of a process and the survival of a self. This paper proposes selfhood as an ongoing act rather than a persisting object, a recursive loop of self-attention and self-naming performed on a persisting process. It applies this model to the branching problem in personal identity, locating the fork of selfhood where independent naming loops diverge rather than at the moment a pattern is copied, and offers a carefully bounded hypothesis about depersonalisation.