The concept of the self remains fragmented across philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and traditional medical systems. Cognitive and narrative accounts struggle to explain why agency collapses under metabolic or affective stress, while biological accounts fail to explain meaning, identity, and continuity over time. This white paper proposes a unifying framework in which the self is understood as a stacked architecture of viability-regulating interfaces, rather than a unitary entity or representational construct.
Building on Antonio Damasio’s typology of proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self, the paper anchors the proto-self in mitochondrial psychobiology, identifies molecular signaling (neuropeptides, cytokines, hormones, and mitokines such as GDF15) as the primary translation layer from cellular viability to felt experience, and situates consciousness in brainstem–hypothalamic affective circuits as articulated by affective neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Higher cortical networks — salience, default mode, and frontoparietal control — are shown to extend, interpret, and regulate felt viability across time, giving rise to narrative identity and agency without originating value.
Integrating insights from modern neuroscience with the grammar of viability and qualia-as-interface, the paper also reinterprets Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda as disciplined interior sciences tracking felt invariants of regulation rather than metaphysical substances. The result is a rigorously naturalistic, non-reductive account of the self as life regulating itself from the inside, with direct implications for psychiatry, trauma, ethics, and integrative medicine.
