Research Program / Claims / conscious-self-2

Identity at birth consists of multiple 'selves' with cores; the physical personality has full freedom to draw from them; some cores may become potential 'trace selves.'

身份在出生时由多个带核心的“自我”组成，物理人格有充分自由从中汲取；部分核心可能成为潜在的“痕迹自我”。

Concept conscious self · Domain Multilevel Subjectivity and Mind–Body Integration · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
For adults, recruit about 500 participants, combining repeated resting-state fMRI, self-referential tasks, and experience sampling to test whether stable competitive states appear in executive control, salience, and default mode networks over 12 months. For the birth aspect, recruit about 300 newborns scanned during natural sleep at birth, 6, 12, and 24 months, followed to age 5; this can only test whether network development predicts later self-representation, not infer the number of selves at birth from network counts.
Suggested paper title
Developmental Origins of Network Competition and Self-Representation: A Longitudinal Multimodal Study
What it would overturn
If it can be proven that multiple identity systems with independent memory and first-person perspective exist at birth, this would revise the developmental hypothesis that self-representation gradually forms with brain maturation and experience.
Candidate labs / funders
Wei Gao，研究婴幼儿功能脑网络; John H. Gilmore，研究早期脑发育
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Coexistence at birth is a potentially distinguishable temporal prediction, but cores, drawing, and trace selves lack identification criteria; normal parallel processing does not satisfy these conditions.
Note
Resting-state fMRI can measure network coexistence and dynamic transitions, but clustering into multiple states alone does not prove multiple identities, nor can it infer that infants have adult-like personalities.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Development of human brain cortical network architecture during infancy — Wei Gao、Sarael Alcauter、J. Keith Smith、John H. Gilmore、Weili Lin (2015), Brain Structure and Function
    143名婴幼儿的纵向数据表明，多种功能网络在出生后逐步组织成熟；多个网络并不等于多个有独立体验的自我。[论文](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24469153/)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim conscious-self-2, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/conscious-self-2