autobiographical self

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The autobiographical self is the narrative and remembered elaboration of embodied selfhood. RB2’s Damasio discussion describes memories, narratives and abstractions growing from the ongoing physiological and affective grounding of conscious life. The proposed subentry is deliberately narrow: it does not posit an immutable inner person or supply a detailed developmental theory absent from the local passage.

Explanation

The inherited witness explicitly connects the conscious mind and autobiographical self to the continuing physiological state of the organism, then names the narratives, memories and abstractions built from it. This warrants a concise relational definition. It does not warrant inventing a separate neural location, numerical threshold or exhaustive developmental sequence for autobiography.

The surrounding account distinguishes the basic felt sense of existence from the more elaborated continuity of a life. A bodily self is therefore not identical to the stories one can tell, and a remembered narrative does not exhaust its physiological conditions. The entry keeps those layers related without treating them as independent substances.

AB’s discussion of selfhood as maintained memory and habit supplies a comparable authorial account of continuity. RB3’s artificial self-model example remains hypothetical and explicitly does not settle subjective experience. These comparisons clarify scope rather than extend Damasio’s specific concept to every system producing first-person text.

Scope and attribution

Keep a bounded subentry; no absent developmental architecture or automatic machine application is invented.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

The local warrant is a brief account of narrative elaboration from embodied continuity.

Occurrence locators: 19, 20.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.