The Philosophy of John Locke Applied to the Systemised Self – Part 10, Masters Series.

Abstract

This essay applies John Locke’s philosophy to the contemporary theoretical concept of the Systemised Self. Locke’s account of the person as a continuing consciousness, his empiricist theory of knowledge, his analysis of language and nominal essence, and his political arguments concerning liberty, consent, and property provide a productive framework for examining algorithmically mediated selfhood. The essay argues that Locke generates a double diagnosis. On one side, algorithmic systems may extend Lockean processes of sensation, reflection, memory, and judgement by enlarging the informational environment in which persons form ideas and conduct practical reasoning. On the other, when a person’s experiences, choices, and self-descriptions are increasingly selected, predicted, and returned by systems built from behavioural data, the Lockean person risks being displaced by a nominal profile: a classification that appears to describe the person while progressively shaping the consciousness it claims merely to represent. The Systemised Self is therefore interpreted not as the disappearance of consciousness, but as the threatened capture of its conditions of formation and recognition. The essay situates this argument within a genealogy of empiricism, rationalism, social contract theory, and critical accounts of mediation. It also discusses the supplied account of the 2026 algorithmic-alienation study as suggestive adjacent evidence, not direct validation, and reads Calhoun’s Universe 25 as a limited biological analogue for the speculative Hollow Absolute. The conclusion proposes that a Lockean response requires renewed control over experience, memory, language, property, and consent, together with empirical research capable of testing rather than presupposing the Systemised Self framework.

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