beforeword · English transcription of the sent letter
Intended recipient: Douglas Hofstadter
Author: Kirill Shebetov · beforeword
Sent to: dughof@iu.edu
Sending date in the supplied materials: The header shows only “Friday”; the calendar date is not shown.
The sending timezone is not supplied.
Status: shown in the Sent folder; no reply published.
The published materials do not establish receipt or reading by the recipient.
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Record data: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/hofstadter/record.json
Russian translation: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/hofstadter/#letter
Transcribed from author-supplied screenshots. Screen line wraps are joined and overlaps included once; wording and punctuation are retained.
beforeword’s context and links to discussed publications are separate on the letter page.

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Subject: Your account of the self: from definition to attribution

Dear Professor Hofstadter,

In your September 2007 interview with Tal Cohen and Yarden Nir-Buchbinder, you discuss a conditional claim: if a soul is a pattern, a sufficiently fine-grained realization of that pattern counts, under your definition, as “the soul itself”.

Please indicate the criterion of sufficient detail for treating two proposed realizations as the same self, and the grounds for applying it in a particular case.

beforeword proposes keeping three elements separately inspectable: the written comparison, the attribution of a shared identity, and the grounds offered for that attribution.

The terms used to explain the attribution—including “pattern” and “self”—remain part of the writing under examination. Definitions and their written justifications receive the same treatment. This also applies to human self-descriptions and to this letter.

The reading procedure and worked examples:
https://beforeword.xyz/model/en/

Kirill Shebetov
beforeword

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