The Hierarchical Preservation Model of Decision-Making: Self-Relevance Encoding across Survival, Meaning, and Lineage–Collective Preservation
The Hierarchical Preservation Model of Decision-Making:
Self-Relevance Encoding across Survival, Meaning, and Lineage–Collective Preservation
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.
Decision-making is commonly analyzed through utility, preference, risk, prediction, or computational constraint. These frameworks have generated substantial insight, but they often leave underdeveloped a more basic question: what is the organism trying to preserve when it decides? This paper proposes the hierarchical preservation model of decision-making, which defines choice as a process of reorganization within a three-tiered preservation system mediated by self-relevance encoding.
The model distinguishes survival, meaning preservation, and lineage–collective preservation as analytically separable but biologically connected layers. Self-relevance encoding specifies how bodily, relational, symbolic, and temporal signals become decision-relevant by determining what counts as self-continuity, self-loss, or preservation. On this account, apparently irrational, self-sacrificial, or self-destructive decisions are not treated as exceptions to decision logic.
They are analyzed as outcomes of preservation-layer reweighting, boundary expansion, reference-point shift, or coherence collapse under biological, relational, cultural, and environmental constraints. The paper further grounds the model in multi-level biological organization, where lower-level limitation or termination can support higher-order viability, while unregulated persistence can become pathological.
Finally, the model reinterprets bounded rationality, prospect-theoretic asymmetries, and active-inference accounts as surface descriptions of deeper preservation-oriented organization. The contribution of the framework is to provide a common interpretive grammar for decision-making across biological, symbolic, cultural, and pathological boundary cases, thereby resetting the explanatory level at which irrationality is interpreted.
