Prediction may build the self while a witness sits behind it

“has already happened. It appears that they came to make a recommendation on behalf of humankind, for we observe that it is in human nature to constantly desire that one’s actions expand without limit, without boundaries, and that everything should be permissible in their eyes to do whatever they wish. If one were left to their natural inclinations, there would be no limit or end to the vehicles of their lustful desires, and they would prefer to be unrestrained, neither fenced in nor bound by any action, until God rebuked us through this Torah, which sets boundaries and measures for all actions — defining how far they may expand according to the Divine will and how far one is permitted to cas”

“A cornerstone of this idea is that agents set the balance between prior knowledge and incoming evidence based on how reliable or 'precise' these different sources of information are – lending the most weight to that which is most reliable. This concept of precision has crept into various branches of cognitive science and is a lynchpin of emerging ideas in computational psychiatry – where unusual beliefs or experiences are explained as abnormalities in how the brain estimates precision.”

“We propose that hallucinations - perceptions without stimulus - can be understood as top-down effects on perception, mediated by inappropriate perceptual priors.”

“In no time, this question will also be followed by a few hypotheses about the cause of the noise (e.g., an intruder, or a branch falling on the roof), which in turn will p”

“This manuscript begins from a concern that current debates in consciousness studies often talk past each other – not because any single theory is wholly wrong, but because each targets a different explanatory domain under the umbrella term 'consciousness'. Rather than choosing sides, this paper argues for a pluralist perspective: one that treats theoretical divergence not as conflict, but as an opportunity for conceptual integration.”

“from within; by steadily watching its ebb and flow, as objective, outward, and therefore not the real Self. This standing back is the first step, detachment. The second, to maintain the vantage-ground thus gained, is recollection. 19. The Mind is not self-luminous, since it can be seen as an object. This is a further step toward overthrowing the tyranny of the “mind”: the psychic nature of emotion and mental measuring. This psychic self, the personality, claims to be absolute, asserting that life is for it and through it; it seeks to impose on the whole being of man its narrow, materialistic, faithless view of life and the universe; it would clip the wings of the soaring Soul. But the Soul d”

“organisms, or parts of organisms, even far below what we generally regard as a conscious level. Reflections of this kind naturally lead to a wider conception of consciousness. It is gradually seen that the earlier inquiries which men have made about consciousness have been of a merely ethical or legal character;--have simply aimed at deciding whether at a given moment a man was _responsible_ for his acts, either to a human or to a divine tribunal. Commonsense has seemed to encourage this method of definite demarcation; we judge practically either that a man is conscious or that he is not; in the experience of life intermediate states are of little importance. As soon, however, as the p”

“Self-preservation, often referred to as the survival instinct, is the inherent tendency of living organisms to take actions that enhance their chances of survival while minimizing potential harm. This instinct manifests in various ways, such as seeking food to satisfy hunger, escaping from dangers, or avoiding threats. Research has shown that both environmental triggers and genetic factors contribute to instinctual behaviors.”

“be treated as an object and appropriated by a new Thought in the new present which will serve as living hook in turn. The present moment of consciousness is thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole series. It may feel its own immediate existence--we have all along admitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct introspection to ascertain the fact--but nothing can be known _about_ it till it be dead and gone. Its appropriations are therefore less to _itself_ than to the most intimately felt _part of its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments,_ which accompany the act of thinking, in the head. _These are the real nucleus of our personal identity,_ and i”

“Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment. It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept. In some explanations it is synonymous with mind, while in others it is considered an aspect of it.”

“consciousness being evidenced by the fact that a series of acts and events embracing years, as we think, pass ideally through our mind in one instant. Well, that extreme rapidity of our mental operations in dreams, and the perfect naturalness, for the time being, of all the other functions, show us that we are on quite another plane. Our philosophy teaches us that, as there are seven fundamental forces in nature, and seven planes of being, so there are seven states of consciousness in which man can live, think, remember and have his being. To enumerate these here is impossible, and for this one has to turn to the study of Eastern metaphysics. But in these two states—the waking and the”

“predictive coding (also known as predictive processing) is a theory of brain function which postulates that the brain is constantly generating and updating a "mental model" of the environment. According to the theory, such a mental model is used to predict input signals from the senses that are then compared with the actual input signals from those senses. Predictive coding is one member of a wider set of theories that follow the Bayesian brain hypothesis.”

“It has been proposed by some that only humans have the ability to mentally travel back in time (i.e., have episodic memory) and forward in time (i.e., have the ability to simulate the future). However, there is evidence from a variety of nonhuman animals (e.g., primates, dolphins, scrub jays, rats, and pigeons) that they have some ability to recover personal memories of what-where-when an event occurred... several animals (primates and scrub jays) have been shown to be able to pass the spoon test. That is, they are able to plan for the future.”

“Research shows that we rely on linguistic knowledge of structure in anticipating others’ words. Unlike predictive-text functions, the study shows that we take into account a larger linguistic structure, focusing on a word’s surroundings within groups of words rather than only what word comes next.”

“The most primitive type of self-awareness is bodily self-awareness, an awareness of one's own body as importantly different from the rest of the environment – as directly connected with certain feelings and subject to one's direct control. Because of bodily self-awareness, one does not eat oneself. And one pursues certain goals. Bodily self-awareness includes proprioception: an awareness of body parts, their position, their movement, and overall body position.”

“At the core of PP is the notion that the brain is in the business of making predictions about the world, and that the brain is primarily an organ that functions to minimize prediction error (i.e. the difference between predictions about the state of the world and the observed state of the world) (Clark, 2017, p.727).”

“and all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal's destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an _hypothesis made by an onlooker_, about the future. But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "_if_ survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work." It has now become an imperative decree: "Survival _shall_ occur, and therefore organs _must_ so work!" _Real_ ends appear for the first time now upon the world's stage.”

“Recently it has been proposed that the psychedelic phenomenon stems from the brain reaching an increased entropic state. In this paper, we use the predictive coding framework to formalize the idea of an entropic brain.”

“yet in this lay the difference between man and the animal. The animal was conscious only, not self‐conscious; the animal does not know the Ego as Subject, as does man. There is therefore an enormous difference between the consciousness of the bird, the insect, the beast, and that of man. But the full consciousness of man is self‐consciousness—that which makes us say, “_I_ do that.” If there is pleasure it must be traced to some one experiencing it. Now the difference between the consciousness of man and of animals is that while there is a Self in the animal, the animal is not conscious of the Self. Spencer reasons on consciousness, but when he comes to a gap he merely jumps over it. So again”

“us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them. And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse and every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light, and seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to do. It is done for its own sake exclusively. What voluptuous thrill may not shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can stimulate her ovipositor to its discharge? Does not the discharge then seem to her the only fitting thing? And need she care or know anything about the future maggot and its food? =Instincts are not always blind or invariable.=”