The contemporary literature on the self and personal identity organizes around several live disputes the framework engages by name. Each is taken up again at [§8.5.5](<8.5.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*The self-model and ego dissolution.* Metzinger's (2003, 2009) self-model theory holds that the conscious self is a representational construction the brain runs, not a substrate it is. The position has been sharpened by neurophenomenology (Varela 1996; Thompson 2007), psychedelic neuroscience (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014; Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019), and clinical work on dissociative and depersonalization disorders. The dispute is whether the self-model is the whole story or whether it points at a more fundamental subjecthood that the construction does not exhaust (Zahavi 2005; Strawson 2017). The framework sides with the self-model account in its strong form: the I is what the recursion builds at sufficient depth, not what the recursion is.

*Personal identity over time.* Locke (1689) identified personal identity with continuity of consciousness; Reid pressed the transitivity objection; Parfit (1984) argued that what matters in survival is psychological continuity, not strict identity, and that the very question of whether a future person is *me* may be empty. Williams (1970), Olson (1997, animalism), and the narrative-identity tradition (Ricoeur 1992; MacIntyre 1981) all stake out positions on what makes a current person the same as a past one. The principal non-reductionist rival stands apart from all of these. The simple or further-fact view (Swinburne 1997; Lowe 1996; Madell 1981) holds that personal identity is a simple, unanalyzable further fact grounded in a persisting immaterial substance, so that fission has a determinate answer and ego-death is the soul's bodily access disrupted rather than the self dissolving. It is the account of the persisting self that Parfit's no-further-fact thesis was built against. The framework's reading — that identity is a construction the recursion runs, structurally the same recursion across time but constituting different content as the recursion proceeds — treats Parfit's reductionism as broadly correct on the metaphysics while accommodating the narrative tradition's correctness about what identity *does* for a deep-recursion being.

*Theory of mind and self-other modeling.* From Premack and Woodruff (1978) forward, the question of which lineages have theory of mind — the capacity to model other minds as minds — has driven comparative-cognition research for half a century. Disputes are live on chimpanzees (Call and Tomasello 2008; Krupenye et al. 2016), corvids (Bugnyar, Reber, and Buckner 2016), and the proper interpretation of false-belief tasks across primates. The framework reads theory of mind as a specific recursive operation — self-modeling extended to model another being's modeling — predicting it should appear in lineages whose recursive depth supports the operation rather than as a species-specific endowment.

*Mirror self-recognition.* Gallup's (1970) chimpanzee mirror studies opened a still-running debate about which species recognize themselves in mirrors and what the recognition demonstrates. Elephants (Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss 2006), magpies (Prior, Schwarz, and Güntürkün 2008), and certain cleaner wrasse (Kohda et al. 2019) have produced positive results that remain contested at the methodological seams (Gallup and Anderson 2020). The framework's reading is that mirror self-recognition tracks the depth at which the self-model includes a body-schema mapped to a perceptual exterior — a real and significant depth, but neither the threshold for the self as such nor the deepest level the recursion reaches.

*Default mode network and the narrative self.* The discovery of the default mode network (Raichle et al. 2001) and its role in autobiographical self-modeling, mind-wandering, and the construction of narrative identity (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, and Schacter 2008) has reorganized cognitive neuroscience around the self-modeling question. The dispute is whether DMN activity is *constitutive* of self-modeling or merely *correlated* with one mode of it. The framework reads the DMN as one implementation, in human brains, of the recursive self-modeling at the depth where narrative identity is constructed; the constitutive activity is broader.

*Social identity and identification.* The twentieth-century sociology and social-psychology literatures on identification (Mead 1934; Erikson 1968; Tajfel and Turner 1979) pulled at the second sense of identity named in the [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) opener: identity as the operation of identifying-with, identifying-against, and identifying-as. The disputes are live on whether social identities are continuous with personal identity or a separate phenomenon, and on the relative weight of inherited identifications versus chosen ones. The framework reads social identity as the same self-modeling operation extended to the relational field the I is constructed within; the two senses of identity name one structural fact at two registers.

*Parasitic mind control and the locus of the self.* *Toxoplasma*, *Ophiocordyceps*, and hairworm cases (Hughes et al. 2012) have driven a literature on what counts as agency, what counts as the boundary of a being, and whether host behavior under manipulation reflects host awareness, parasite agency, or some hybrid (Andersen et al. 2009; Adamo 2013). The framework's reading — two recursions persist throughout, neither becoming the other; the host's substrate is biased, not the host's recursion transferred — is one position in that dispute.

The contemporary literature on the self divides over the constitutive or representational status of the self, identity over time, the species distribution of theory of mind, the role of the DMN, the relation between personal and social identity, and parasitic-control cases. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.5.5](<8.5.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


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← [8.5 Identity](<8.5 Identity.md>) | [8.5.2 What is Required](<8.5.2 What is Required.md>) →
