The Architecture of the Nightly Logout Sleep, Agency Suspension, and the Authorial Self in Simulation-Compatible Ontologies

Description Title: The Architecture of the Nightly Logout: Sleep, Agency Suspension, and the Authorial Self in Simulation-Compatible Ontologies Author: Guy Collins Date: 14 January 2026 Summary This academic report reframes the universal phenomenon of sleep as a structural feature of selfhood that challenges classical assumptions about personal identity and agency. While typically viewed as a biological necessity, sleep reveals that agency is not a fundamental property of the self, but rather a contingent and revocable capability. During sleep, biological existence and experiential capacity (dreaming) persist, yet the subject loses authorial control over experience. Key Arguments • The Permissions Model: The paper argues that sleep acts as a "nightly logout," where the right to author experience is withdrawn while the underlying system continues to run. Agency is interpreted as an operational "permissions interface" rather than an ontological constant. • The Problem of the Gap: By examining John Locke’s memory-based identity and Derek Parfit’s psychological continuity, the author proposes a "succession model" of the self. In this view, each waking self is a newly instantiated successor tied to previous versions by psychological chains. • Simulation Compatibility: The report explores how this structure is maximally compatible with simulation-style ontologies. In such systems, sleep satisfies the computational needs for downtime, internal maintenance, and the isolation of exploratory processes (dreaming) from environmental impact. • Ethical Implications: Collins argues that if agency is conditional, moral responsibility must be "temporally bounded," localizing meaning specifically within the windows of granted authorial control. Conclusion Ultimately, the report suggests that sleep is not evidence of an illusion, but evidence of an architecture. It concludes that the self is not the engine of the world, but a temporary interface with "write access" granted by a broader generative system.