A working catalogue of enduring questions, kept current as the inquiry evolves.
If memory is the substrate from which a continuous self emerges, what does it mean that memory is also reconstructive rather than reproductive? This question underlies the Homeric project and recurs throughout the neuroscience reading.
Not in the present state of the field. But the question itself organizes a programme of reading: Chalmers, Dennett, Damasio, Tononi, and the more recent predictive-processing literature.
Shostakovich remains the principal case study: music that seems to remember suffering on behalf of a generation. The music-and-psychology project extends this into a mixed-methods study of mood, motivation, and creative agency.
Not a settled question. The current working position is that human creativity is constrained by embodiment and biography, while artificial creativity is constrained by the structure of the training corpus. The difference may be a difference of constraint, not of kind.
A working hypothesis: literature is not a metaphor for cognition but a method of investigating it. The Homeric reading is the principal test case.
The clinical literature (extreme amnesia, advanced dementia) and the philosophical literature (Locke, Parfit, Derek Parfit) both speak to this; the question is whether they speak about the same thing.
The Mead reading ('I' and 'Me') is the current entry point, with comparative cognition in cats as the empirical anchor.
The flagship essay argues that it does not. The thumos, noos, and psyche are productive multiplicities rather than fragments of a pre-existing self.
A reflexive question kept in the notebook. The honest answer is probably: with the freedom of not yet knowing which questions are not allowed.