Colloquium: Elijah Millgram (University of Utah)

Title: A Life Hack with a Future

Abstract: Personal identity -- what it takes to be the same person over time -- is best understood from what Dennett called the design stance.  Rather than pursue traditional conceptual analysis -- a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for being who you now are, later on -- I'll develop a creature-construction argument turning on bounded-rationality constraints, and attempt to recover central features of personal identity.   I will focus on the time it takes to complete investigations, the need to monitor other-things-equal inferences for correctness, and the imperative, within the context of protracted and open-ended investigations, for generic resources and strategic positioning.