Research Program / Claims / outer-ego-5
The fusion of inner and outer selves represents the formation of a new consciousness; after fusion, identity is no longer confined to the outer ego.
内在与外在自我的融合代表一种新意识的形成，融合后身份不再局限于外在自我。
Concept outer ego · Domain Multilevel Subjectivity and Mind–Body Integration · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.
Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
About 120 experienced practitioners undergo a three-condition randomized crossover experiment: usual state, reduced self-boundary state, and ordinary focused attention; another ~120 novices receive 8 weeks of training for independent validation. Use a dual-task of sustained attention and probabilistic intuitive judgment with objective answers, along with corresponding single-task baselines. Primary endpoints include reaction time, omission rate, false alarm rate, intuitive accuracy, and dual-task cost. Pre-register joint criteria for 'intuitive improvement' and 'non-inferiority of sustained attention,' confirm states with blinded experience coding, with 6-month follow-up, project duration about 18 months.
Suggested paper title
Self-Boundary Attenuation and Dual-Task Performance: Pre-registered Tests of Sustained Attention and Intuitive Judgment
What it would overturn
If dual-task cost steadily decreases after controlling for practice and task difficulty, it would revise the model that 'these task combinations have a fixed shared processing bottleneck,' but not directly prove a new conscious entity.
Candidate labs / funders
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana — University of Haifa，自我边界与冥想研究; Yair Dor-Ziderman — 自我体验与神经现象学研究; Zoran Josipovic — 非二元觉知研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Expansion of identity boundaries has similar phenomenological descriptions; the added 'intuition surging while still able to perform tasks' can be converted into joint predictions, but the original text gives no quantitative constraints beyond effect direction.
Note
Subjective quantity of intuition surge does not equal judgment accuracy, and laboratory dual-task performance cannot directly represent all daily functioning.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim outer-ego-5, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/outer-ego-5