Article Type: Theory
Highlights
Decision-making is defined as reorganization within a preservation hierarchy.
Self-relevance encoding links survival, meaning, and lineage–collective preservation.
Irrationality is analyzed as reweighting or collapse of preservation layers.
Biological grounding connects limitation, termination, and viability.
Culture modulates how self-continuity and self-loss are encoded.
Working Summary
This paper offers a common interpretive grammar for decision-making by defining choice as a process of reorganization within a three-tiered preservation system mediated by self-relevance encoding. The three tiers comprise survival, meaning preservation, and lineage–collective preservation. This framework makes apparently irrational, self-sacrificial, or self-destructive decisions interpretable as outcomes of reweighting or collapse among preservation layers under specific constraints.