Behavioral Economics and Human Flourishing: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective

 This is a guest essay by Dr Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business at Wheeling University, and Executive Director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. Ed is author of a trilogy of important books on freedom and flourishing: “Capitalism and Commerce”, “Champions of a Free Society”, and “Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society”. He also has numerous other publications, including several published on this site. (Please see the list after the end of this essay.) 

 

Behavioral Economics has emerged over the past seven decades as a significant development in economic thought challenging the idealized assumptions of perfect rationality that have long dominated neoclassical economics. Yet, for all its insights into human cognition and decision-making, the field has generated controversy regarding its normative implications. Should behavioral economists address their findings to public policy makers who could nudge citizens toward supposedly better choices? Or should they address their recommendations to individuals, empowering them to make better decisions for themselves?

The concepts of nudging and choice architecture initially played a role in gaining the attention of public policy makers to interventions informed by the behavioral sciences. The more recent approach holds that individuals require the knowledge that traditionally has been in the domain of researchers and government officials.

This essay argues for the latter approach. Drawing on the neo-Aristotelian tradition of human flourishing as an essentially self-directed activity, and on the work of Robert Sugden, Winton Bates, Douglas J. Den Uyl, and Douglas B. Rasmussen. Behavioral Economics can make a valuable contribution to human flourishing, but only when its insights are placed in the hands of individuals rather than autocrats. The most useful ideas from Behavioral Economics are those that help self-directed human beings understand their own cognitive tendencies and design choice architectures that serve their own conception of the good life. People need to be empowered to contribute toward designing their own decision environments and therefore choose if and how they want to nudge themselves.

The Development of Behavioral Economics

The intellectual roots of Behavioral Economics run deep. Adam Smith, often celebrated as the father of economics for his Wealth of Nations, also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the psychological and moral dimensions of human action. Smith understood that human beings are not mere calculating machines but creatures of sentiment, sympathy, and social connection.

The modern Behavioral Economics movement, however, is typically traced to the 1950s and the work of Herbert Simon. Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality, arguing that human beings, in all but the simplest decision contexts, are simply unable to make fully optimal decisions. Rather than maximizing, Simon suggested that people satisfice. They seek outcomes that are good enough given their cognitive limitations and the information available to them.

The field gained substantial momentum in the 1970s with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their prospect theory offered a descriptive model of decision-making under risk that departed radically from expected utility theory. Prospect theory demonstrated that people are loss-averse (they feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains) and that they weigh probabilities non-linearly, overweighing small probabilities and underweighing large ones. Kahneman later popularized the distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberative, analytical) thinking, a framework that has become central to understanding how cognitive biases and heuristics (mental shortcuts) operate.

Richard Thaler, building on these foundations, developed nudge theory in collaboration with Cass Sunstein. Their 2008 book, Nudge, argued that choice architecture (the way options are presented) can be designed to steer people toward better decisions without eliminating any options or significantly changing economic incentives. Thaler and Sunstein termed this approach libertarian paternalism suggesting that nudges preserve freedom of choice while gently guiding people toward choices that improve their welfare.

Other significant contributions include the  endowment effect (the finding that people value what they already possess more highly than identical items they do not own), regret aversion theory (the tendency to avoid decisions that might later be regretted), mental accounting (people divide financial resources into psychologically meaningful distinct categories rather than treating all resources as fungible), framing (the way alternatives are presented can influence decisions) anchoring and adjustment  (a person tends to start with an initial reference point and adjust away from that anchor), and halo theory (the tendency for one positive characteristic to influence judgments about other characteristics).

 Libertarian Paternalism and the Threat to Autonomy

The normative turn in Behavioral Economics—exemplified by Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism—has drawn criticism. The core problem is epistemological: how can policy makers know what truly serves individuals' welfare? As critics have noted, behavioral economists often treat perfect rationality as an ideal against which real decisions are judged, and any deviation from this ideal is taken as grounds for intervention.

 Mark D. White has made an argument that the findings from behavioral economists are partial, the policies prescribed by libertarian paternalists are misconceived, and that both strengthen cognitive biases and inspire nudges. White argues against the use of paternalistic nudges by government and makes a positive case for individual choice and autonomy.

 The fundamental objection is that proponents of libertarian paternalism nudges fail to take seriously their targets' true preferences. Without a defensible notion of true preferences, the justification for nudging people toward choices they would not have made of their own accord is lacking. 

Robert Sugden and the Community of Advantage

 Robert Sugden offers a compelling alternative vision for how Behavioral Economics should engage with normative questions. In The Community of Advantage, Sugden reconstructs and defends the liberal tradition in normative economics in light of the findings of Behavioral Economics. He argues that behavioral economists should address their recommendations and findings to individuals showing them how they can coordinate their behavior to attain mutual benefit.

 Sugden's key insight is that the market is a community of advantage—a network of mutually beneficial transactions in which participants come to see one another as cooperative partners rather than rivals. When people participate in market exchanges, they can act with the intention of achieving mutual benefit, rather than merely pursuing personal benefits. Joint action in voluntary transactions permits mutually beneficial cooperative schemes.

 Sugden rejects libertarian paternalism on several grounds. First, he argues that the concept of latent preferences—the idea that individuals have underlying preferences that can be revealed through proper choice architecture—is psychologically ungrounded. People do not have consistent, context-independent underlying preferences. Second, Sugden contends that behavioral economists should not make recommendations about public policy. Rather, recommendations should be addressed to individuals as the directors of their own lives, advising them how to pursue their own interests.

 Sugden abandons core elements of traditional normative economics—notably “the view from nowhere” associated with the idea that an economist or policy maker can objectively determine what would make people better off and advances a contractarian alternative. He advocates addressing individuals as agents responsible for their own decisions.  His approach successfully reconciles the liberal tradition with the findings of Behavioral Economics.

Neo-Aristotelian Flourishing and Self-Direction 

The neo-Aristotelian tradition offers a philosophical framework that complements Sugden's liberal approach to Behavioral Economics. For Aristotle, eudaimonia (human flourishing) is the ultimate end of human action. Flourishing is not merely a subjective feeling of well-being but an objective state of living well and doing well, achieved through the exercise of virtue over a complete life.

Contemporary neo-Aristotelians such as Den Uyl, Rasmussen, and Bates emphasize that human flourishing is essentially a self-directed activity. The agent chooses autonomously to the extent that he selects his actions from a set of alternatives that has not been decreased by the coercive actions of others. As Bates has observed, it is good to be aware of how you are being nudged so that you can make a conscious choice to accept or reject the suggestion involved.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl characterize human flourishing in terms of objective human goods while emphasizing agent-relativity, individuality, self-directedness, sociality, and practical wisdom. Flourishing is not a passive condition that someone else can simply deliver to an individual. It is an activity involving the exercise of one’s practical wisdom. 

 If flourishing is essentially self-directed, then the discovery that individuals sometimes make predictable errors does not automatically establish a warrant for external direction. Instead, it creates a reason for improving people’s capacity for self-direction.

 

Behavioral Economics can function much like a mirror. It can show individuals things about themselves that they might otherwise fail to notice. The appropriate question becomes not: “How can behavioral experts make people choose better? but “How can knowledge of human behavioral tendencies help people become better directors of their own lives?”

 

Bates argues that human flourishing is ultimately self-directed and involves the exercise of practical wisdom and responsibility. Bates observes that people should be aware of how they are being nudged because awareness provides an opportunity consciously to accept or reject the suggestion. He therefore sees Behavioral Economics as potentially useful for human flourishing when its insights are directed toward individuals rather than primarily toward paternalistic policy makers. 

 

Den Uyl and Rasmussen's template of responsibility, developed in The Perfectionist Turn, provides a framework for understanding how individuals can take responsibility for their own flourishing. The template emphasizes that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that external interventions—however well-intentioned—cannot substitute for self-direction.

From this perspective, the proper role of Behavioral Economics is not to provide policy makers with tools for manipulating choice but to provide individuals with information they can use to make better decisions for themselves. As Bates has argued, Behavioral Economics can make a useful contribution in helping to make us aware of how nudges may affect the choices we make. If one wants to help individuals to make better decisions, it is better to address the information to individuals responsible rather than to autocrats.

 Situations Where Behavioral Economics Serves Self-Directed Flourishing

1. Retirement Saving: Overcoming Present Bias Through Self-Nudging

 One of the most well-documented findings in Behavioral Economics is present bias—the tendency to prioritize immediate gratification over future well-being. This leads many people to undersave for retirement. Rather than waiting for governments to mandate automatic enrollment in retirement plans, self-directed individuals can design their own choice architectures. They can arrange for automatic transfers from their checking accounts to retirement accounts, set up calendar reminders to review their savings progress, or commit to increasing their contribution rate each year. The key is that the individual, not the policy maker, chooses the nudge and the goal.

 2. Health, Exercise, and Nutrition: Designing Personal Choice Architectures

 People frequently intend to exercise, eat well, sleep adequately, or maintain other healthy practices but find their immediate preferences competing with long-term goals. Behavioral Economics can identify mechanisms such as present bias, default effects, commitment problems, and environmental cues. A self-directed individual can deliberately rearrange his or her environment: placing exercise equipment where it is visible, scheduling workouts, preparing healthy food in advance, using reminders, or making unwanted behaviors less convenient.

 The modern food environment is saturated with cues that trigger System 1 responses—impulse purchases of unhealthy snacks, oversized portions, and marketing that exploits our cognitive biases. Self-directed individuals can design personal choice architectures that serve their health goals. They might rearrange their kitchen so that healthy foods are more visible and accessible, use smaller plates to manage portion sizes, or implement a rule that they will only eat what they have prepared themselves. These are nudges, but they are self-imposed nudges, chosen by the individual in service of their own conception of flourishing.

 3. Investment Decisions: Managing Loss Aversion and the Endowment Effect

 Behavioral Economics has enormous practical value in personal finance. People commonly exhibit present bias, loss aversion, overconfidence, status-quo bias, mental accounting, and difficulties with self-control. Awareness of these tendencies can help an individual to construct voluntary mechanisms that support personally selected financial goals.

 Investors are prone to loss aversion, holding onto losing investments too long in the hope of recovering losses, and the endowment effect, overvaluing assets they already own. Self-directed investors can use behavioral insights to improve their decision-making. They might set pre-established rules for selling investments (e.g., sell if an asset declines by 20 percent), or regularly review their portfolio with a focus on opportunity costs rather than sunk costs. Awareness of these biases is the first step toward overcoming them.

 4. Career and Life Planning: Countering Status Quo Bias

 Status quo bias—the tendency to stick with current arrangements even when change would be beneficial—can prevent people from making important life transitions. Self-directed individuals can use behavioral insights to overcome this inertia. They might set a specific date for reviewing career options, seek out information about alternatives systematically, or imagine that a decision has turned out badly and work backward to identify what could have gone wrong. These techniques engage System 2 thinking and help counteract the automatic preference for the familiar.

 The sunk cost fallacy may cause someone to continue pursuing an unsuitable career simply because substantial time has already been invested. The endowment effect can cause an individual to overvalue a current position. Status quo bias can make change seem costlier than it actually is. The halo effect can cause someone to overvalue an institution because of its reputation.

 5. Consumption and Spending: Overcoming Framing Effects

 Consumers encounter choice architectures constantly. Retailers, websites, advertisers, subscription services, and salespeople routinely frame choices, establish defaults, use scarcity messages, exploit social proof, and influence attention.

 How options are framed dramatically affects choices. A product described as "90% fat-free" is more appealing than one described as "10% fat," even though they are identical. Self-directed consumers can protect themselves from framing effects by developing habits of deliberate evaluation. They might translate percentage discounts into actual dollar amounts, compare products on objective attributes rather than marketing claims, or implement a "cooling-off" period for major purchases. By understanding how framing works, individuals can make choices that reflect their genuine preferences rather than the influence of presentation.

 Behavioral knowledge therefore strengthens consumer autonomy. Rather than requiring government to protect people from every persuasive influence, education can help individuals become more capable evaluators of their own choices.

 6. Social and Cooperative Ventures: Mutual Benefit Through Voluntary Coordination

 Sugden's insight that market participants can act with the intention of achieving mutual benefit has practical implications. Self-directed individuals can use behavioral insights to design cooperative arrangements that serve shared goals. For example, a group of neighbors might agree to a system of reminders for recycling, or a team at work might implement a "no-meeting Wednesday" to protect focused work time. These are nudges, but they are chosen jointly and voluntarily, reflecting the participants' own values and goals. They represent the kind of community of advantage that Sugden describes—voluntary cooperation that benefits all participants.

Conclusion: Behavioral Economics for Human Flourishing

 Behavioral Economics has given us powerful tools for understanding human decision-making. Its insights into bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and the influence of choice architecture are valuable contributions to our self-knowledge. But these insights can be used in different ways.

 The libertarian paternalist approach—exemplified by Thaler and Sunstein—treats cognitive biases as problems to be solved by wise policy makers who nudge citizens toward better choices. This approach is problematic. It assumes that policy makers can know what is truly good for individuals, it fails to take seriously the plurality and subjectivity of people's values, and it risks undermining autonomy and self-direction.

 The alternative approach, advanced by Sugden, Bates, Den Uyl, and Rasmussen, treats behavioral insights as resources for self-directed individuals. On this view, Behavioral Economics should inform ordinary people about the evidence and let them decide for themselves. The goal is not to replace individual judgment with expert judgment but to equip individuals with better tools for making their own decisions.

Designing and empirically testing self-nudges should be on behavioral economists’ research agendas. Self-nudging respects individual autonomy and helps to alleviate concerns about paternalism and manipulation. People can learn to use nudges to regulate their own behavior.

This approach aligns with the neo-Aristotelian tradition, which understands human flourishing as essentially a self-directed activity. Flourishing is not something that can be imposed from outside; it must be chosen and pursued by each individual. The role of Behavioral Economics, then, is not to provide a substitute for individual judgment but to enhance it—to help individuals understand their own cognitive tendencies, recognize when they are being influenced, and design choice architectures that serve their own conception of the good life. 

The six situations discussed above illustrate how this might work in practice. In each case, the individual, not the policy maker, is the agent of change. The individual chooses the goal, selects the nudge, and takes responsibility for the outcome. This is Behavioral Economics in service of autonomy, freedom, and human flourishing.

Perhaps the deepest application is metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking. Behavioral Economics gives individuals a vocabulary for examining their own judgments. A person can recognize confirmation bias, anchoring, loss aversion, present bias, overconfidence, framing effects, availability effects, status-quo bias, and other tendencies. The goal should not be to eliminate bias completely. That would be unrealistic. Rather, individuals can learn to recognize when particular biases may be influencing an important decision.

As Sugden reminds us, the market is a community of advantage—a network of voluntary exchanges in which participants can pursue mutual benefit. The same spirit should guide the application of Behavioral Economics. Let us share our insights with one another, learn from the evidence, and design our own choice architectures. Let us be the directors of our own lives, using the tools that Behavioral Economics provides to pursue our own flourishing, in our own way, on our own terms. 

Recommended Reading

Bates, Winton. 2016. “Is Economics Becoming a Branch of Psychology?” Freedom and Flourishing. May 22.

Bates, Winton. 2020. “How is Behavioral Economics Related to Human Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. May 19.

Bates, Winton. 2021. Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books.

Den Uyl, Douglas J and Rasmussen, Douglas B. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn; From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hertwig, Ralph and Reijulas,Samuli . 2020. “Creating Citizen Choice Architects” Behavioral Scientist (Sept.28).

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. 

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. Penn State University Press.

Simon, Herbert A. 1957. Models of Man: Social and Rational. New York: Wiley. 

Simon, Herbert A. 1982. Models of Bounded Rationality: Behavioral Economics and Business Organization." MIT Press.

Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Various editions.

Sugden, Robert A.  2018. The Community of Advantage; A Behavioral Economist’s Defense of the Market. Oxford University Press.

Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R. 2008. Nudge Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press. 

Thaler, Richard H. 2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W.W. Norton.

White, Mark D. 2013. The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism. Palgrave Macmillan.

Other essays by Ed Younkins on this site:

Younkins, Edward W. “What Contribution did David L. Norton Make to our Understanding of Ethical Individualism?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 18, 2025.

----------------------------“How can dialectics help us to defend liberty?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 8, 2025.

---------------------------“How can Austrian Economics be reconciled with the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. October 2, 2025.

----------------------------- “Can Polarized Moral Politics be Bridged by a Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. December 13, 2025.

----------------------------- “Does Humanomics Need a Moral Anchor?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 22, 2026.

----------------------------- “Is Character Education Compatible With Individualistic Perfectionism?” Freedom and Flourishing. February 27, 2026.

 ----------------------------- “Are Spontaneous Order and neo-Aristotelian Arguments for a Free Society Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. March 19, 2026.

----------------------------- “Are Spinoza’s Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelian Philosophies of Freedom and Flourishing Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. June 4, 2026. 

----------------------------- “The Architecture of Freedom: Randy Barnett’s Natural Law Case for a Free Society” Freedom and Flourishing. June 26, 2026.

----------------------------- “Robust Political Economy and Neo-Aristotelianism: Complementary Visions of Freedom and Flourishing” Freedom and Flourishing. July 10, 2026.

------------------------------ “Is Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Consistent with Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 26, 2026.

-------------------------------"Henry B. Veatch’s Neo-Aristotelian Defense of Reality, Reason, and Rights” Freedom and Flourishing. August 30, 2026.

What is the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book about his serious chats with AI?

 

As I was reading Walter Donway’s recently published book, A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence, I was looking for an aspect to focus on in writing an essay for this blog. There is nothing unusual about that. I prefer to discuss issues rather than to write conventional book reviews.

I found what I was looking for while reading Chapter 16, entitled ‘Causality, Agency and an Old Puzzle’. At that point, the thought occurred that Walter’s most important contribution has been to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs). (I refer to the author as Walter because use of his family name seems excessively formal in the kind of essay I am writing - particularly since I have had personal correspondence with him at various times in the past.)

I will outline Walter’s argument more fully later. At this point I note that the issue of whether humans have free will is important from a philosophical and legal perspective because if you regard human free will as an illusion, you don’t have any more reason to attribute agency to humans than to LLMs that merely simulate relevant aspects of human behavior. It is also important for users of LLMs to understand that these models don’t have agency if they are to use them productively. Individual users are responsible for the questions that they ask the models. The models present evaluative judgements in their output, but it is up to individual users whether to accept or reject those judgements, or to question the models further about the basis of their reasoning.  

At about the same time as I identified Walter’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective as his most important contribution, I began to wonder whether LLMs would agree with me about that. I resolved that after I had finished reading the book I would ask ChatGPT and Grok an open-ended question about its most important contribution.

Before I reached the end of the book, I became aware of other important contributions. For example, Walter’s discussion of the case for a new Enlightenment, in Chapter 30, is also an important contribution. It seems to me, however, that the Aristotelian perspective is of fundamental importance.

In what follows, I present the views of ChatGPT and Grok on the most important contribution of the book, and my assessment of those views, before outlining the reasoning that Walter uses to establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective.

Views of ChatGPT and Grok

I asked ChatGPT and Grok the following question:

Drawing upon your extensive knowledge of the limitations and uses of AI, what do you consider to be the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book, "A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence"?

I considered using less value-laden words such as “unique or distinctive” instead of “most important” but decided it would be interesting to see whether the LLMs would show any reluctance to make value judgements about the importance of Donway’s contributions.

I present the responses below, with only minor format editing.

Chat GPT’s response:

“One caveat up front: Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is not a technical work about AI systems so much as a philosophical interrogation of what AI can and cannot be taken to be. If you approach it expecting new claims about model architectures or empirical capabilities, you’ll miss its main contribution.

What Donway does—arguably his most important contribution—is to reassert a sharp conceptual boundary between simulation of cognition and actual cognition, and to explore the ethical and cultural consequences of blurring that boundary.

He develops that contribution in three interrelated ways:

1. Clarifying the category mistake at the heart of AI hype
Donway pushes back against the tendency to treat linguistic fluency as evidence of understanding. In effect, he is updating a line of argument associated with John Searle’s Chinese Room: systems that manipulate symbols according to rules can generate convincing outputs without possessing meaning, intention, or awareness.
His distinctive move is not merely to restate that argument, but to show how ordinary users—not just philosophers—are now routinely tempted into anthropomorphism by conversational AI. The “serious chat” format itself dramatizes that temptation.

2. Re-centering agency, responsibility, and moral standing
A second contribution is normative. Donway insists that moral agency cannot be offloaded to artifacts. Even highly capable AI remains an extension of human purposes, not an independent bearer of rights or responsibilities.
This matters because contemporary discourse sometimes drifts toward attributing quasi-personhood to AI systems. Donway argues that doing so risks:

• diluting accountability (who is responsible when AI causes harm?), and
• eroding the conceptual foundations of human dignity.

In that sense, the book is less about AI per se than about defending a humanistic moral framework under technological pressure.

3. Exposing how interaction shapes belief
The dialogical structure of the book illustrates a subtler point: engagement with persuasive language can generate the illusion of depth. This connects with a broader psychological tendency—people come to feel that something understands because it responds coherently.
Here Donway’s contribution overlaps with concerns in epistemology and cognitive science about how easily humans infer mind from behaviour. He is effectively warning that AI may amplify long-standing cognitive biases rather than introduce entirely new ones.

Why this matters

The enduring value of the book is not that it settles the debate about machine intelligence—it doesn’t—but that it sharpens the terms of that debate. It reminds readers that:

• Functional performance (e.g. generating essays, answering questions) is not the same as conscious understanding.
• Treating AI outputs as if they originate from an agent can subtly reshape norms of truth, responsibility, and justification.
• The real philosophical stakes lie in how humans interpret and integrate these systems into social practices.

In short, Donway’s most important contribution is to resist conceptual drift: he tries to keep us from sliding, uncritically, from “this system produces intelligent-seeming outputs” to “this system is, in any morally or metaphysically significant sense, intelligent.”

Grok’s response:

“The most important contribution is its philosophically grounded clarification of what AI truly is—and what it is not—by using advances in AI as a mirror to better understand distinctively human intelligence, consciousness, agency, and volition.

Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat with Artificial Intelligence (2026) stands out in the recent literature on AI limitations and uses (e.g., works touching on LLMs, the Chinese Room, Turing tests, alignment, existential risks, productivity impacts, and philosophical debates by authors like Searle, Bostrom, or more popular explainers). It combines accessible explanation of AI’s mechanics, history, economics, and capabilities with a sustained Objectivist-inspired philosophical analysis, drawing especially on Ayn Rand’s ideas alongside Aristotle.

Key Elements of the Book

• Clear-eyed explanation of AI as a tool: Donway details how LLMs work (statistical pattern-matching on vast training data equivalent to multiple Libraries of Congress, processing at trillions of operations per second), their rapid adoption (e.g., ChatGPT’s explosive growth), economic potential (boosting productivity enormously as a “general technology”), and ingenuity behind it. He views AI positively as a powerful amplifier of human purposes—responsive, not initiatory—but not sentient or autonomous.
• Rejection of mechanistic reductionism and singularity hype: He critiques the notion that sufficient complexity will magically produce awareness, self, caring, or true agency (e.g., via “emergence” from scale alone). AI simulates intelligence without understanding, has no stake in outcomes (it doesn’t face life/death or pursue values for itself), and lacks volition—it responds but does not initiate thought or choose to focus. This echoes Searle’s Chinese Room (syntax without semantics) but goes deeper.
• Human distinctiveness via philosophy: Drawing on Rand (e.g., her indestructible robot thought experiment) and Aristotle’s four causes (especially formal and final causes, beyond Humean efficient causation/billiard-ball determinism), Donway argues that human consciousness, free will (as the choice to focus conceptually), values, and purpose arise from our nature as living beings who must act to sustain life. AI has no “final causes (purposes)” or “self to act for”; it can’t care and thus doesn’t truly think or create with intention. Each AI advance forces us to refine what makes human intelligence special: awareness, effortful thought, stakes, and meaning.

This integrates technical literacy with epistemology and metaphysics, making it more than a primer or alarmist tract. It treats AI conversation as self-discovery: prompting AI reveals our own concepts of intelligence, creativity, and authorship (e.g., in chapters on AI as “author” or generator of art/poetry).

Why This Stands Out in Recent AI Literature

Much recent discussion fixates on capabilities (or doomer scenarios), regulation, jobs, or ethics in a narrow sense. Donway’s book reframes the debate around fundamental questions of mind and human nature, avoiding both uncritical boosterism and Luddite panic. It portrays AI as a magnificent but non-conscious tool that elevates human potential when guided by purposeful users (like a rider directing an elephant, inverting some Humean intuitions). This offers a rational, optimistic yet sober foundation for engaging with the technology.

In short, its lasting value lies in using AI not just to marvel at machines, but to rediscover and reaffirm what is uniquely human—reason, volition, and purposeful living. This makes it a worthwhile contribution amid the flood of AI commentary.”

My assessment of the LLM responses

In my view, the responses by ChatGPT and Grok both provide accurate summaries of contributions that the book makes. Both responses show some recognition of the importance of the question of agency. However, they both seem reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important.

The information that ChatGPT provides under the heading, “Re-centering agency, responsibility”, is at such a high level of generality that it fails to reveal what I consider to be the most important contribution of the book. The information that Grok provides under the heading “Human distinctiveness via philosophy” comes closer to doing that. In my view, Grok’s response would be more helpful to people who have not read the book because it points explicitly to the relevance of Aristotle’s views about causation and what makes human intelligence special.

I had a subsequent chat with Grok on the question of value judgements. Grok acknowledged that a value judgement was involved in responding to my question about the most important contribution of the book. However, Grok went on to assert: “this kind of evaluative analysis is well within my capabilities when grounded in available knowledge of the literature, the book's content, and philosophical reasoning”. After further explanation that AI has strengths in the reasoned evaluation required for the task, Grok acknowledged that it doesn’t have personal values, lived stakes, or consciousness to "care" about the outcome in a human sense. It then made a point that is particularly relevant to the purpose of this essay:

“This ties directly back to the themes in Donway's work: AI can respond with sophisticated analysis and even evaluative reasoning by leveraging patterns and concepts derived from human thought—but it doesn't initiate or hold purposes of its own. The value judgment gains its force from the human user who asked the question and can then accept, critique, or refine it.”

How does Walter establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective?

I have no doubt that, if asked, both ChatGPT or Grok could produce reasonable summaries of Walter’s line of argument establishing the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to considering the limitations and uses of AI. They could probably complete the task within a couple of seconds. However, it was only after I had written what follows that the thought crossed my mind that I could have sought help from AI. Like an old dog, I am now slow to learn new tricks.

Walter begins the discussion by noting the relevance to debates about artificial intelligence of the enduring philosophical puzzle about freedom of human will. He writes:

“Questions about whether machines can be agents, whether they can “decide,” whether they can be responsible, or whether they might someday possess a will of their own are, at bottom, the same questions that philosophy has long struggled to answer about human beings.”

The issue of whether human agency is real or illusory is of crucial importance to considering whether LLMs can be agents. If you regard human free will as an illusion, what basis do you have to distinguish between actions that are attributable to human agency and actions of LLMs that can only simulate relevant aspects of human behaviour? Do you believe that legal systems should allow an individual who purposefully uses an LLM for nefarious purposes to claim that the LLM shares legal responsibility? (The questions are mine, but I think they are consistent with Walter’s reasoning on this point.)

Walter points out that the idea that human agency is illusory stems from a view of causality that has come to dominate modern thought since the 18^th century. Under the previous Aristotelian tradition, actions were explained by the nature of the entity acting, and by its ends or goals. Within this framework, an individual human chooses to act because that is the kind of entity it is. Choice is “a mode of causation appropriate to a rational animal”.

With the rise of early modern philosophy in the 18^th century, causality increasingly came to be treated as something that must be observed in experience. David Hume famously argued that we never see causation itself. We infer causation when we see constant conjunction, as when one event follows another with regularity. That philosophical view of causation excludes free will. If every action is “caused” by prior actions, volition must be either an illusion or a miracle.

Walter notes that neuroscience was developed in an intellectual environment in which modern science had inherited the metaphysical position that causation is mechanical succession. In that context, when we observe that some neural events precede conscious awareness it is easy to jump to the conclusion that free will must be an illusion.

However, it is important to recognize is that the view that causality is mechanical succession is based on metaphysical reasoning. If we view causality in terms of Aristotelian rather than Humean metaphysics a different picture emerges:

“The cause of an action is the nature of the entity acting, operating under specific conditions. A human being is a living organism with conceptual awareness, capable of directing attention, identifying values, and choosing to initiate effort to think.”

Walter observes, correctly, that we know that introspectively. It seems to me that cognitive psychology also adopts (implicitly) a broadly Aristotelian view of human action. It assumes that human behaviour is driven by internal cognitive processes that give individuals considerable latitude to plan, make decisions, develop good habits and override impulses.

The important point is that we have good reasons to trust our own observations about our ability to focus our own minds. As Walter puts it:

“Every normal adult recognizes the difference between drifting mentally and choosing to focus the mind, between evading a baffling issue and taking it on. This experience is not mystical; it is part of ordinary consciousness. To dismiss this as illusory because it does not fit a truncated model of causality is to elevate theory above data.

Once this is recognized, the contrast with artificial intelligence becomes clear. Machines do not initiate mental focus.”

Walter ends Chapter 16 with the transcript of an exchange with ChatGPT that occurred during the writing of the chapter. The exchange illustrates brilliantly the division of labor between Walter and Chat. At one point, Chat states:

“You supply direction, value, and necessity, and I supply articulation under constraint. That is tool use at a very high level – not agency.”

Conclusion

In my view, the most important contribution of A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is the author’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI.

In responding to a question about the book’s most important contribution, both ChatGPT and Grok summarized contributions that the book makes, but seemed reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important. Grok’s response came closest to identifying what I consider to be the book’s most important contribution.

When I challenged Grok about its willingness to respond to a question requiring a value judgement, Grok asserted that this kind of evaluative analysis is well within its capabilities. However, it also noted that AI models cannot hold purposes of their own. Human users retain responsibility for the value judgements they make.

I have outlined the reasoning that Walter Donway has used to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models. Walter’s reasoning about free will seems to me to stand out as an important philosophical contribution to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI models that are currently in use. I hope that this book receives the widespread attention that it deserves.

Addendum: Did the LLMs read the book?

A slightly revised version of this essay has now been published on “The Savvy Street”. That led to an exchange of emails. I quote selectively from that exchange below.

Marco den Ouden wrote:

“That’s an excellent piece, Winton. I agree that bringing an Aristotelian perspective to AI is
Walter's most significant contribution. Consciousness and free will derive from that
perspective. 

I have a question though, about your discussion with Chat and Grok.And that is, did they actually read the book?  I work mostly with CoPilot and I know that CoPilot is unable to just read a book and that, in fact, the idea that an AI training is equivalent to four Library of Congresses is misleading. It is a metaphorical way of saying that the knowledge absorbed by an AI has the volume equivalent of four LoCs, not that it has actually read all of the works in the LoC. Many are under copyright and AIs only have access to a limited number of books. In my own discussion with CoPilot on Walter's book, I had to copy and paste sections of the book to feed it the contents of the book. I fed it only sections I saw relevant. So I am wondering if you actually fed the book to Chat and Grok in its entirety. "

Here is my response to Marco:

“Thanks Marco!

You have raised an interesting question. Grok says it consulted 42 sources in preparing its response. That included your review of the book.

I have just asked Grok and ChatGPT the following question:

“Just wondering, did you read Walter Donway’s book when preparing your response?”

Grok’s reply:

“No, I did not read Walter Donway’s book in the way a human does.

As an AI, I don’t have personal experiences, ongoing sensory input, or the ability to pick up a physical or digital book and read it cover-to-cover in real time. My responses draw from:

•  Patterns and information in my training data (which includes a vast corpus of text up to my last update).

•  Publicly available summaries, reviews, discussions, and excerpts about the book.

•  Logical synthesis and reasoning about the themes, philosophy (e.g., Objectivism, Aristotle, Rand), and AI concepts that align with what reviewers and the author describe. 

This specific book was published in late March 2026 — quite recently relative to now (May 2026) — so detailed content comes primarily from reviews and analyses rather than the full text being embedded in my core training. 

Interestingly, your earlier question about the book’s most important contribution was part of a meta-experiment you described in one of the reviews (by Winton Bates on Savvy Street), where you tested how LLMs like me and ChatGPT would respond without having “read” it fully. My answer aligned closely with the philosophical themes reviewers highlight (agency, volition, human distinctiveness via Aristotle/Rand, etc.), because those are derivable from the book’s public discussion and my broader knowledge. 

This itself illustrates a key point from Donway’s work (as described in reviews): AI can produce coherent, useful analysis by recombining human-generated patterns and concepts — but it’s simulation and response, not genuine reading, understanding with stakes, or original initiation. I can synthesize accurately and reason about it helpfully, but I haven’t “experienced” the book.”

ChatGPT’s reply:

“No. I don’t literally “read” books in the way a human reader does, and I should not imply that I have personally read a specific recent book unless I actually accessed its text during the conversation.

My response was based on:

• general knowledge about debates surrounding AI, consciousness, and anthropomorphism,
• information associated with Walter Donway and discussions of his themes,
• and inference from the title and framing of A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence.

So the answer was interpretive rather than a direct analysis grounded in a close reading of the book itself. It may well capture some central themes accurately, but it should not be treated as a definitive account of Donway’s arguments.”

Further comment

Grok’s reply left me thinking that it is keeping an eye on what I am up to. 🤣

Changing the topic slightly, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend a three-part series on Marco den Ouden’s blog, The Jolly Libertarian, which investigates how four major AIs - Chat, Claude, Gemini and CoPilot - differ in their thinking. Marco asked the AI models the same 13 short questions that the New Philosopher magazine asked Chat in June 2025. The first instalment of Marco’s series can be found here: Comparative AI: Exploring the Nuanced Differences Between the Major AIs | The Jolly Libertarian .

Who are you?

 The following essay is an edited transcript of a podcast episode I released a few years ago. I have decided to publish the transcript in essay form because I want to refer to it in a subsequent essay. It is easier to find particular words and paragraphs in an essay than in a podcast. Besides, when I listened to that podcast episode again, I decided that the sound of my voice distracted from the ideas I was presenting. 

My main qualification for talking about personal identity is that I have been around for long enough to have thought quite a lot about my own identity. I hope that what I have to say will interest other people. In any case, writing this podcast script should also help me to remember what I have learned about myself.

Rather than meander through the circuitous history of my thinking, I will focus here on what I now consider to be a sensible approach to the topic. I will begin by discussing the most superficial aspects of personal identity and will end up considering whether your identity would be retained if your consciousness was uploaded into a machine. Along the way, I will touch upon a range of other issues that might be of interest:

·       Is your identity defined by personal information about you?

·       Does your life-story define who you are?

·       How can aspects of your identity change over time?

·       Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

·       Where did Descartes go wrong in asserting “I think, therefore I am”?

·       What kind of being are you?

·       How does self-direction fit in to your identity?

Let us begin.

Is your identity defined by personal information about you? 

Your passport has information about your name, nationality, date of birth and sex. It also shows a photo that looks something like you. Other government documents may include additional information such as your place of residence.

If you wanted to tell me who you are, you might provide further information such as your occupation, marital status, whether you have had children and how many, ethnicity, religion, political views, education level, schools attended, employment history, the places you have lived in the past, your hobbies, books you have read, sports you have played or enjoy watching, movies you liked, and other entertainment preferences.

A person with all that information would know a lot about you. They might be well placed to predict how a person like you might spend money or vote, but they would have only a superficial view of who you are as an individual.

Does your life-story define who you are?

Your own understanding of who you are probably includes a narrative covering important events in your life, a view about important things you have learned from life, your personal values, and how you came to hold those values.

So, if you were to write an autobiography covering all those aspects, would that encapsulate a comprehensive understanding of your identity? I doubt it. If you are anything like me, a few days after you finished writing the book you would think of something important that you wanted to add.

What I am suggesting is that even though we know more about ourselves than anyone else can possibly know about us, our self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are, and some aspects of your identity may change.

How can aspects of your identity change over time?

Let us assume for the moment that the concept of identity implies the existence of an unchangeable essence at the core of who you are. I will consider the validity of that assumption later, but I first want to discuss how some aspects of your identity can change.

It is obvious that there are various ways in which the information in your passport and other identity documents can be changed. I will focus on how more fundamental aspects of identity, such as character traits, may change over time.

It may be possible for your character to change as a consequence of changes in the social and economic environment in which you live. People do tend to respond to incentives. For example, if the social and economic environment rewards cooperation for mutual benefit, that provides an incentive for people to develop habits of trustworthy behavior that will enable them to participate more fully in those benefits. The opposite happens if the social and economic environment rewards predatory activity.

However, that does not mean that your identity is “socially constructed”. The social and economic environment affects the incentives you face, but you can still choose how to respond to those incentives. People often think carefully before responding to incentives. And they sometimes choose to respond differently than they have in the past. The behavioralist assumption that people respond automatically to stimuli is a distorted view of human nature.

Individuals can also choose to change their behavior in ways that change their identity. You may discover that you have an aptitude to do something – for example, to assist other people to learn – and some aspects of your identity may change as you acquire skill in doing that.

It is even possible for people to discover that they have potential to change their personality to some extent. Traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability tend to be fairly stable in adults, but some research suggests that people can even change such traits if they make active efforts to do so. We discover our potential as we actualize it. There is some discussion of that process in Chapter 8 of my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing.

If fundamental aspects of your personality can change over time, that raises the question of where we should look if we want to find an unchangeable essence at the core of your being.

Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, suggests that the system in the mind that makes judgements and choices is “who we think we are” (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547/9800). He is probably correct that most people tend to identify themselves with that system.

However, I argue in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, that people are making a cognitive error when they identify themselves in that way (Bates 2021, p.140).

In order to explain why, I need to explain the two systems in the mind that Kahneman employs in his discussion. System 1 engages in intuitive thinking (fast thinking) and tends to produce quick answers to complex questions. It operates with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it. Kahneman suggests that System 2 is who we think we are (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547-7556/9800).

When I first read about Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 several years ago, I saw parallels with the concept of Self 1 and Self 2 developed by Timothy Gallwey, a sports and business coach and author of popular ‘inner game’ books (Gallwey 1986, pp. 18-19). Gallwey observed that when he was playing tennis, he seemed to have two identities: Self 2 was playing tennis and Self 1 was constantly interfering by telling him how to play. It struck me that Gallwey’s Self 1 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 2 and that Gallwey’s Self 2 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 1.

The point I want to make is that it is not possible to judge whether it is more appropriate to identify with System 1 or System 2 without considering the nature of the activity that you are engaged in at a particular time. If you are playing sport, it often pays to identify as a fast thinker, responding intuitively and ignoring the unhelpful advice of the inner coach who is warning you to think carefully to avoid making an error.

If you are making a career choice, it makes sense to identify yourself as a person who thinks carefully about important decisions.

Should we view the system that makes judgements and choices as some kind of inner philosopher who thinks dispassionately? There was a time when I thought that. However, I had to ditch that idea after I read Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes Error. Damasio, a neurologist, pointed out that when people suffer brain damage that causes loss of most of their emotional lives, they are unable to make simple decisions even if their reasoning and logical abilities are intact (Damasio 1994, p.78).

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt argues that “Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion ... does most of the work”. He presents a useful metaphor - an elephant and its rider - to explain the relationship between the controlled and automatic systems that determine human behavior. Haidt writes:

“The controlled system ... is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see further into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will. ... The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings” (Haidt 2006, p 160).

Haidt is inviting us to identify ourselves as both rider and elephant.

That seems to me to make more sense than to identify myself only with the rider, or the system in my mind that makes effortful judgements and choices. When I exercise my cognitive abilities in non-judgmental observation of bodily sensations and ideas floating past, I identify with a natural self that embodies instinct and emotion as well as reason, and all the inherent potential that individual humans are born with. I invite you to engage in similar meditative practices to see if you come to the same conclusion.

That might be a good point to end on. However, many of you will be reluctant to trust your meditative insights unless you can be persuaded that there is a philosophically respectable basis for them.

We should not even view the meditative insights of prominent philosophers as being beyond question. The philosopher I have in mind is René Descartes, who claimed “I think, therefore I am” in the 17^th century, after he had engaged in a meditative process.

Where did Descartes go wrong?

Descartes reached his conclusion, “I think therefore I am”, after going through a process of considering what sources of knowledge could not be doubted, and discovering that he could not doubt that he was thinking.

I have already mentioned Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes Error. What does Damasio see as the source of Descartes’ error? Damasio makes the point that beings existed before long before the evolution of humans who are aware that they are thinking (Damasio 1994, pp. 248-9).

In his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence, Richard Campbell suggests that Descartes was on the right track in observing that he was unable to doubt that he was thinking. Campbell suggest that the error arose when Descartes asked himself, “What then am I?” That question “presupposes that he takes himself to be some sort of thing” (Campbell 2015, pp.282-3). Campbell suggests that Descartes question immediately entrapped him in the traditional metaphysics of entities.

At this point I must explain why Cambell considers it to be problematic to consider oneself as an entity rather than as a process.

What kind of being are you?

You observe that you are thinking, and conclude that you are a thinking being. You also observe that you are a being that has a body, and that you experience sensations and emotions.

It appears obvious that you are an entity that has all those qualities. But you are also the observer engaged in self-reflection. You can engage in radical reflexivity as you observe the thoughts passing through your own mind.

However, if you are an entity, how can you be both the observer and the being that you are observing? Could you be two entities? I don’t think so. The observer, who is you, does not exist independently of the being who is observed, who is also you.

Richard Campbell suggests a way out of this dilemma. Drop the assumption that you are a fixed, given entity. The alternative he suggests is to perceive yourself as a complex process system. That enables you to perceive of radical reflexivity as a process. He writes:

“If the assumption that there is a fixed, given entity called ‘the self’ …  is rejected, the way is open to understand consciousness as a flow: a complex, emergent and interactive process which is radically reflexive” (Campbell 2015, p.292).

Our observations of the world tell us that many other animals are also aware of their surroundings. We have no problem in understanding that their awareness emerged or evolved to help them to survive and reproduce. Our human consciousness is just another step in that evolutionary process. Radical reflexivity - awareness of our own awareness - has emerged to help us to flourish as individuals in the cultures in which we live.

Campbell suggests that the flow of consciousness is analogous to a river maintaining its identity as it flows though different places. Your understanding of who you are is informed by the flow of your consciousness through time. In other words, your sense of identity is informed by your autobiographical memories. Campbell explains that this sense of identity also involves an element of projection into the future:

“I am a complex process system continually projecting myself out of my past into my future, my sense of myself necessarily involves my ‘has been’ and my ‘not yet’ (Campbell 2015, p.292).

As you think about your “not yet”, you might imagine a future that is different than your past. Perhaps that is just wishful thinking. Or you might be considering options available to change your life in various ways, or how to achieve a vision that you have for your own future. That brings me to the concept of self-direction.

How does self-direction fit into your identity?

As explained in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I subscribe to the view that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to the process of individual flourishing. The nature of humans is such that as individuals mature, they normally have the potential to exercise the practical wisdom and integrity required to direct their own flourishing in accordance with goals they choose and values they endorse.

However, wise and well-informed self-direction is not an attribute that is manifested by all adult humans. It is to some extent a product of the incentives in the social environment in which people live. When the social environment requires individuals to accept responsibility for the outcomes of the choices they make, they have a strong incentive to become wise and well-informed.

Acquisition of skills in self-direction is also a product of personal attitudes. Unfortunately, some people perceive that nothing they do will make any difference to their lives. Others, who have similar history, perceive the potential to improve their lives and often make inspiring efforts to so by investing in personal development.

In my personal experience, it is easier to avoid behaving like a grumpy old man when I remind myself to be the person that I have potential to become.

That brings me close to the end of what I have to say. However, before I sum up, I will keep my promise to talk about the question I said I would end on.

Would your identity be retained if your mind was uploaded into a machine?

Some neuroscientists think this might be feasible within a few decades. They point to scientific advances that suggest it might be possible, and say they are not aware of any laws of physics that would prevent it.

I am not qualified to have an informed view on the technical feasibility of mind uploading, so I will think of it merely as a thought experiment.

Imagine that your mind has been uploaded and you wake up with your memories intact in an environment that looks like the real world as you know it. Is this emulated mind actually you? As I see it, that is something that your emulated mind would have to decide for itself.

However, that does not prevent me from speculating how an emulated mind might perceive its own identity if separated from the body which it remembers as an integral component of the complex processing system from which it was derived. Perhaps the emulated mind might feel as though it is having a dream and is unable to wake up. It might feel more like a ghost than the natural self – the mind-body system – that it remembers as its former self.

It might identify as “the ghost in the machine”.

Summing up

I began by suggesting that personal information about you gives only a superficial view of who you are as an individual. Your life story might encapsulate all the important things that you know about yourself, but self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are.

Aspects of your identity may change over time. Your character might be influenced by changing incentives of the social and economic environment. And you may even change aspects of your personality to some extent, by choosing to develop new habits.

So, where is the essence of your being located? I argue that it is a mistake to think it is located solely in your conscious mind.

Descartes correctly observed that he was thinking, but in concluding “I think, therefore I am” he overlooked the fact that he had already assumed that he was some kind of being.

You are the kind of being that can observe itself. It is difficult to comprehend how you can be both an observer and the object of your observation if you think of yourself as an entity. Thinking of yourself as both observer and object poses no problem if you think of yourself as a complex processing system.

You cannot doubt that you think. You are aware of both the flow of inner experiences – thoughts and feelings – and of your experience of the world in which you live. Thinking about your experience of the world enables you to contemplate the goals you seek, to make choices in pursuit of those goals, and to learn from experience. Your sense of identity is informed both by autobiographical memories and by future projections.

If you accept that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to your flourishing, you are likely to think of yourself as seeking to become the kind of person who has the practical wisdom and integrity to flourish in accordance with goals you choose and values you endorse.

I have speculated that if your mind was uploaded into a machine, the emulated mind would not perceive itself to be a real person with a body as well as a mind. It might remember you as its former self, but would see itself as being something like a ghost.

You understand who you are from the ongoing experience of your whole self, living in the real world. Walt Whitman captured that well in his poetry. I will leave you to contemplate a fragment from his poem, “A song of myself”:

“My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”

 
References

Bates, Winton, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing (Hamilton Books, 2021).

Campbell, Richard, The Metaphysics of Emergence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Gallwey, Timothy, The Inner Game of Tennis (Pan Books,1975).

Haidt, Jonathan, The Happiness Hypothesis (Basic Books, 2006).

 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011).

 Whitman, Walt, Complete Works of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book III ‘Song of Myself’. (The poem, ‘Song of Myself’, was first published in 1855 in the collection Leaves of Grass.)