Scientific and Existential Accounts of the Self Serve Different Goals

This insight draws a sharp distinction between two fundamentally different projects in the study of selfhood: the scientific project, which aims at empirical accuracy and internal coherence, and the existential project, which aims at normative guidance for the lived task of becoming oneself. The claim is not that these projects are unrelated, but that they are genuinely non-identical — and that conflating them leads to subtle but consequential errors. A predictive processing account of self-modeling, for instance, may be empirically robust while offering nothing prescriptive about how to inhabit one's life more fully. Conversely, a Jungian or Vedantic framework may be existentially potent without mapping cleanly onto any neuroscientific model.

The cartographic metaphor is instructive: topographic and demographic maps describe the same territory but serve incommensurable purposes. When thinkers map Relevance realization frameworks over depth-psychological or contemplative models, the correspondences they find are real and useful — but the expectation of perfect structural symmetry between accounts reflects a Category error. No master blueprint is required, and pursuing one may actually impoverish both projects.

What is required instead is methodological honesty about which goal is primary in a given inquiry. The position articulated here is explicit: existential usefulness is not a pleasant side effect of good science but the principal criterion by which any account of the self earns its place. The scientific account is valued instrumentally — insofar as it enables, legitimates, and deepens the existential project of re-homing human phenomenology and practice in frameworks that empower rather than estrange.