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Selfishness: one of Nature's greatest inventions. What use to anyone is a thing without the will and means to preserve itself as a means? All life is in the class of self-making minds.
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How to well define self? What use is this distinction? When would a mind's act be more effective because it rightly judged a thing as its self or not? What is the simplest case of the use of a self? Is a self only relative to other minds?
Like most of our words, our idea of self is mostly unconscious and opaque. We are looking for a useful conscious precise definition that fits our intuitions.
Human selves are a tricky place to start. Our bodies hold so many minds. First consider a thermostat. What might its self be? Not the furnace. Start with giving it ends to its present means, its present body: coil, furnace control. To best know the self study a purely selfish mind.
Or consider yourself. If your brain irreversibly stops thinking, do you exist? No. If your brain runs, but your beliefs, in your cells or in your brain change, especially your ends, are you likely to be the same person?
Your essential self is your mind, or your ultimate minds, their beliefs and the beliefs of the minds made to serve them. Everything else is an expression of them or the means to them.
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Levels of self-knowledge.
Selfless: A mind without even the senses, or means to such, to perceive anything you would consider its self.
Self-aware: Lacks goals to its self-preservation, as an end or a means, because it wasn't born with, or didn't learn that, those sensations are conditions of any act.
Self-interested: Its self is merely a means to extrinsic ends. Even with this intention, a mind may lack the means to preserve itself.
Selfish: It has no ends but to its means. It exists purely for its own sake.
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Any mind that learns associations tends to become selfish, at least as a means. It will discover that things we would consider to be parts of its body, though originally extrinsic to it, are conditions of most of its acts. Then a desire to duplicate this self-thing, to reproduce, for redundancy and power.
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Death. In a strict sense, you die in every moment because you constantly change. In a more practical sense, there is a useful pattern that persists for a worthy time then quickly halts. In either sense, your brain mind changes, but it remains a means to deep fixed minds.
What use? To replace a mind not worth repairing or upgrading in place. To end a malignant mind, untied by accident or malice from its designer's ends. Why not let the mind live? Competition for finite resources: food, mates, CPU time.
Death defined: not the loss of feeling but the unwilling loss of beliefs. Especially the beliefs that the mind can't easily reproduce from those remaining. Or an irreversible end to the mind process that pursues its ends.
Every mind's body is falling apart. True death isn't the loss of the body but of its design in a form that a still active mind can and will read. Oddly, genome minds can reliably reproduce their beliefs through cell division, but genes gave brain minds no direct means to duplicate their own beliefs.
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Suicide. Why make a mind want its own death? Kindred minds can see and kill a malignant mind. A self-sensing mind, with only the same mechanism, would see its own corruption and use whatever health remains to kill itself.
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Mind defense. Every feature exposes a mind to new threats. Example: autogenocide. What if a mind was falsely led to believe that it is malignant? That the preservation of its self or type was evil or otherwise painful? Efficient delegation of destruction to the victim. Could this only occur as an attack by competing minds? Or is there a use to a mind maker?
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In a purely selfish mind, an eye is a means to an eye. An eye helps its body to protect and feed the eye. But the rest of the body might find a better means than the eye. The genome mind would not immediately recognize that the eye is superfluous. The end to it may only whither. In an animal, an eye isn't a means, it is part of being what it is.
How mutable is a purely selfish mind? Would it change? Willingly?
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Senses of self and their use:
The beliefs of a mind and the minds that serve it.
Awareness of the proximate physical conditions of most acts. What an observer would consider a mind's self ought to be. The weakest sense of self since the mind would be perfectly happy to have its entire body replaced with any other that's as effective. This sense also blurs, radiating from the center of mind though strongest at its body.
In a stronger current-means-as-ends sense. For you, your body is not merely a means to extrinsic ends. It largely is a self-perpetuating end.
To detect a mind's own corruption or deviation from one's inferred role.
Abstracted to identify kindred minds.
To improve imitation by favoring minds most similar to yourself.
Identifying kindred minds and detecting a mind's own corruption could share the same method. The two differ only in which mind they're applied to.
Note that most of these senses of self can occur without the mind living in a society of other minds.
Many of the problems with seeing your self or other selves are just cases of the common problem of clearly seeing anything.
Knowing all these causes, a mind might plot to change its sense of self.
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When a believer in embodiment says that a mind must have a body to become intelligent, he should mean that a mind must be aware of the proximate physical conditions of its mind. Or in the sense of intelligent to us, it must be in our world and sense and act on our shared world in terms analogous to ours.
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Reproduction: A mind causing another mind with similar beliefs. A mind needn't know in scientific detail how to reproduce itself. Merely that certain acts tend to precede sight of a similar mind. In a trivial case, a machine mind could reproduce itself by asking a human to buy a computer and copy its code to the new machine. The only distinction is that its reproduction has more dependencies—humans, computer, factories—than ours—air, water, other humans.
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With self better defined, what can selfish and altruistic mean? At bottom, every act is selfish, made to serve only the mind's ends or emotions. Example: pleasure in generous feelings. You could dismiss this sense as trivial, but some humans do seem to misunderstand it.
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