The Character Who Began to Reason: A Didactic Introduction to the Architecture of the Self, Conscious Action, and Reason

This text explains, through a brief and accessible account, how a human organism constructs during development a biographical entity referring to the organism itself; how that informational entity, without a material body of its own, comes to operate as a referent of actions, giving rise to the functional emergence of the entity we commonly call the Self; and how, when the Self begins to carry out actions by means of language, Reason develops. Version v3 expands and refines the proposed architecture. It develops the relationship between Biographical Peter and the Functional Autobiography through the concept of coupling without fusion; makes explicit the recurrent circuit through which the biographical trajectory participates in the organization of new actions and receives their consequences; explicitly formulates the postulate of the Self as an emergent living individual at the biographical scale; and distinguishes the material scale that sustains an action from the scale at which that action can be individuated. It also develops the role of Reason as the capacity of the Self to act, by means of language, upon past events, possible futures, fictions, projects, theories, and other relationships belonging to Abstract Worlds. The work is a didactic and condensed summary of Conscious Action and the Self: How the Organism Constructs a Biographical Entity That Comes to Carry Out Actions (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21722674). Its purpose is not to explain the particular qualities of experience, but rather how the actor whose action we call conscious emerges, and what transformation occurs when that actor acquires the capacity to reason.