Сергей Гладков – The Subject as a Process of Stabilizing Experience (страница 1)
Сергей Гладков
The Subject as a Process of Stabilizing Experience
Sergey V. Gladkov
The Subject as a Process of Stabilizing Experience
2026
Contents
Preface
The Problem of the Fixed Subject
The Minimal Model of the Subject
Experience as a Multilevel Field of Organization
Mechanisms of Stabilizing Experience
Continuity: Memory, Language, and Meaning
Fragmentation and Reconfiguration
Unfinished Patterns and Repetition
External Structures and Distributedness
The Comparative Position of the Model
The Boundaries of the Model and Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix
Preface
This book proposes a conceptual model of the subject as a process of maintaining the coherence of experience. Its aim is not to introduce a new entity, replace older concepts with it, and declare the problem of the subject solved. On the contrary, it begins from the assumption that a significant part of the difficulty in describing the subject arises precisely when explanation prematurely takes the form of a hidden object: an inner observer, a stable center, a self-identical I, or some other entity that supposedly stands behind the variability of experience and secures its unity (Metzinger, 2003; Gallagher, 2000).
The working hypothesis of the book is that the subject can be described more productively not as a thing, but as a process. In its minimal formulation, the subject is a process of maintaining the coherence of experience. In a more developed formulation, the human being is understood as a multilevel system for stabilizing experience. This formulation does not remove questions of memory, body, language, attention, personal history, social relations, and external supports. On the contrary, it makes them central, because it is through them that experience preserves connectedness, lived continuity, and the possibility of self-reference without the need to introduce a separate governing entity (Damasio, 1999; McAdams, 2001; Menary, 2007).
The book deliberately limits its own claims. It does not offer a metaphysical theory of the subject. It is not a neurobiological theory of consciousness. It is not a clinical protocol, a therapeutic model, or a guide to psychological practice. It is not a cosmological hypothesis and does not allow an extra-scientific expansion of concepts. Its status must be defined strictly from the outset: it is a scientific-theoretical conceptual model whose task is to refine explanatory language and to describe, in a more disciplined way, what is usually translated too quickly either into ontology or into popular psychology.
This limitation is not a weakness of the model. It is a condition of its scientific usefulness. Whenever a theory of the subject begins to claim more than its own explanatory apparatus allows, it loses the distinction between an analytical level, a working hypothesis, and an established claim. For this reason, the book consistently distinguishes at least four layers: the core of the model, its logical consequences, comparative claims in relation to other theories, and positions that must retain the status of working hypotheses. If a thesis does not withstand this distinction, it does not strengthen the model, but makes it less precise.
The proposed book is situated within an existing field of research and does not claim to be isolated from it. The question of the subject has long been developed in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, personality psychology, theories of embodied and enactive cognition, narrative identity, self-model theory, predictive processing, and the extended mind (Metzinger, 2003; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991; McAdams, 2001; Friston, 2010; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). However, the presence of these research lines does not mean that it is enough simply to gather them into a general overview. The book proceeds from another task: not to list all possible approaches, but to construct a minimal explanatory framework within which it is possible to distinguish strictly what is meant by the subject, what function is attributed to it, and by what means the coherence of experience is maintained.
For this reason, comparative analysis plays a supporting but necessary role in the book. It is needed neither to declare the proposed model radically new nor to reduce it mechanically to one of the already known approaches. Its task is scientific positioning. If the model is close to anti-substantialist theories of self, this must be stated directly. If it differs from them, the difference must also be stated directly. If some claims rely on research into memory, embodiment, narrative, external cognitive supports, or the active organization of perception, that reliance must be indicated through explicit references and with preservation of the limits of the source's applicability (Gallagher, 2000; Damasio, 1999; McAdams, 2001; Seth, 2014; Menary, 2007). The literature in this book does not decorate the text; it limits and disciplines it.
The central concept of the book, the coherence of experience, must not be understood as a hidden substance or as a universal criterion of normativity. The issue is not normative completeness, inner harmony, or psychological well-being as such. Coherence denotes a minimal structural connectedness that allows experience not to disintegrate into mutually disconnected fragments, and allows a person to retain the possibility of distinguishing oneself, acting, remembering, revising meanings, and maintaining a certain continuity of one's own history. This connectedness may be stable, fragile, partial, temporary, conflictual, and subject to reconfiguration (Gallagher, 2000; McAdams, 2001). This is why the book gives special attention not only to stabilization, but also to fragmentation, rupture, repetition, and reconfiguration.
Such an approach requires caution in language. The terms of this book must not behave like disguised entities. The subject is not an inner human being inside a human being. Continuity is not a new name for the soul. Attention is not the spotlight of a hidden observer. External structures are not a mystical extension of the subject. If a term begins to explain too much, it must be narrowed. If it begins to sound like a new ontological unit, it must be returned to its function in the model. This rule is not stylistic; it belongs to the logic of the book itself.
From this follows the compositional logic of the text that follows. The book does not begin with a dogmatic proclamation of the central formula. It must arrive at it through a problem. First, the intuitive model of a fixed subject is called into question and its explanatory limits are shown. Then the minimal model of the subject as a process is formulated. After that, the book clarifies what is meant by experience, by what mechanisms its coherence is maintained, how continuity and fragmentation arise, how repetition and reconfiguration work, and what role external structures play. Only after this does it become methodologically justified to compare the model with related theories and to fix its boundaries.
Thus the book offers neither a completed system nor a final solution to the problem of the subject, but a disciplined research framework. Its strength, if it has one, should be found not in the scale of its promises, but in the economy of its assumptions, the clarity of its terms, and its capacity to describe a wide range of phenomena without appealing to unnecessary entities. This also defines the main critical filter of the whole book: if an entity can be removed and the model continues to work, that entity should be removed.
The Problem of the Fixed Subject
Initial Intuition
An ordinary description of the human being often begins with an assumption that seems so obvious that it is almost never formulated explicitly. It is assumed that somewhere within experience there exists a stable subject: the one who perceives, decides, remembers, chooses, observes one's own thoughts, and remains the same through changes of state. This intuition is convenient for everyday language. It allows us to say: "I thought," "I decided," "I changed," "I remember," "I observe myself." Yet the convenience of a grammatical form is not evidence for the existence of a separate inner center.
The scientific problem begins where everyday grammar is taken for ontology. If language contains a subject of action, it does not yet follow that the structure of experience contains a separate entity that performs the role of an inner controller. The grammatical "I" may designate not a thing, but a point of organization of an utterance, a practical form of self-reference, or the result of a temporary stabilization of experience. The initial question, therefore, is not whether a human being has a self in some sense. The question is narrower: does the explanation of experience require a fixed inner subject as a special entity?
This formulation is not the same as denying subjectivity. On the contrary, it begins from the fact that subjectivity is a real phenomenal and functional field: there is experience, attention, bodily state, memory, meaning, action, speech, and self-description. But the presence of these processes does not imply that an unchanging center must stand behind them. In this respect, the present approach is close to anti-substantialist lines of analysis of the self, where the self is considered not as an independent thing, but as a complex structure of modeling, organization, or self-reference (Metzinger, 2003; Gallagher, 2000).