3.4 The General Structure of Cognitive Dynamics: Analysis and Synthesis 49 long periods of time, small changes within the context of the existing self may suffice to allow the system to control itself intelligently. Humans can also develop what are known as subselves [Row90]. A subself is a partially autonomous self-network focused on particular tasks, environments or interactions. It contains a unique model of the whole organism, and generally has its own set of episodic memories, consisting of memories of those intervals during which it was the primary dynamic mode con- trolling the organism. One common example is the creative subself — the subpersonality that takes over when a creative person launches into the process of creating something. In these times, a whole different personality sometimes emerges, with a different sort of relationship to the world. Among other factors, creativity requires a certain open-ness that is not always productive in an everyday life context, so it’s natural for the selfsystem of a highly creative person to bifurcate into one self-system for everyday life, and another for the protected context of creative activity. This sort of phenomenon might emerge naturally in CogPrime systems as well if they were exposed to appropriate environments and social situations. Finally, it is interesting to speculate regarding how self may differ in future AI systems as opposed to in humans. The relative stability we see in human selves may not exist in AI systems that can selfimprove and change more fundamentally and rapidly than humans can. There may be a situation in which, as soon as a system has understood itself decently, it radically modifies itself and hence violates its existing self-model. Thus: intelligence without a long-term stable self. In this case the “attractor-ish” nature of the self holds only over much shorter time scales than for human minds or human-like minds. But the alternating process of synthesis and analysis for self-cons