The Minimal Self

Abstract

This paper argues that selfhood is not a separate substance added to subjecthood, but subjecthood made temporally explicit. The paper begins from the claim established in Paper I: there is a minimal subject, a self-maintaining organization for which continued existence and termination are intrinsically non-equivalent. It then asks how such a subject becomes a self over time. The central claim is that memory alone is not enough. Retained information must be organized around the same continuing bearer, and that organization is achieved through persistent self-modeling. Self-modeling is therefore not an extra faculty added on top of memory, but the organizational principle that makes retained history function as autobiographical continuity. On this account, selfhood is a path-dependent achievement: a temporally extended organization that integrates past states into present control and future anticipation. The paper develops this argument through definitions, lemmas, and a theorem identifying the minimal self as the subject whose retained history remains functionally organized around one continuing bearer. It is the second paper in a trilogy, following The Minimal Bearer of Experience and preceding The Minimal Person. This paper builds on Paper I, The Minimal Bearer of Experience (Qiang Dai, Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21700483), which identifies the minimal bearer of experience.