goals are identity

Our core notion of a rational agent is an entity that behaves in a coherent way to pursue some goal.

But at a fundamental level there is never really an 'entity'. Everything is process: nouns and discrete entities are only ever a property of the map, not the territory.

We learn the agent abstraction by seeing other people in the world, modeling them as pursuing their various goals. And then this abstraction turns inwards --- we observe ourselves pursuing goals and develop a self-model, ideas about what we want and what we like and dislike.

What seems interesting is that we also learn group identities: when a group of people seem to have similar goals, we infer the existence of a "we", a shared entity pursuing those goals. The family, the tribe, the nation, the set of all Taylor Swift fans, etc. The shared entity doesn't "really" exist --- it's totally imagined, just like all other selves (the self is a construct) --- but believing that we're part of it then creates new desires related to the homeostasis of that shared entity.

In a deep sense, there is nothing to the concept of an agent other than the coherent pursuit of a goal, so whenever we observe coherent pursuit of a goal, it's natural to infer an 'agent' pursuing that goal.

Since most of our goals are to some extent shared with other people, even the rest of nature (one observable 'goal', in fact the only one that really stands up to scrutiny, is for things to just keep happening as they happen), we end up identifying as part of these larger things.

This process seems more or less the essence of organic alignment.