The Government Within

I have a new guest post up at Ribbonfarm, mostly on the work of George Ainslie.

To go a bit meta on it: I find Ainslie fascinating but hard to internalize. I wrote the post mostly as a way to force myself to reread parts of his work and try to get deeper into it, with I guess some partial success. Any theory of distributed agency is hard, I think. The natural operation of the brain is based in simple agency and narrative; we aren't so good at thinking about systems with distributed control, or at the boundary between mechanism and agency.