This is harnessed in Greg Egan's short story "Learning To Be Me": https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf
replyMakes sense. The boundary we draw around a group of neurons that we call "self" is just arbitrary.
replyI think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.
replyWe build models of the world in order to predict it.
But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.
Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.
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