Hierarchical Brain

I am my self symbol schema

One of the major conclusions of this set of web pages is that what I call “I” or “my self”, which is probably the same as what some people call “mind” or “soul”, is actually a schema, a model in my brain of me and my brain processes, that I call my self symbol schema. This page summarises how I came to this conclusion and reviews the implications.

This page also tells how a psychologist, a philosopher, a neuroscientist and a polymath have each published a book that gives an account of the existence of a self-model, but none of them jump the final hurdle to say that the self-model is actually “the self”, they all say that the self is an illusion, or words to that effect.

This page is part of level 6 of my seven hierarchical levels of description because it depends on the existence of symbol schemas, and, most particularly, the self symbol schema. It is at the same level as self-awareness although in many ways it depends on it, but a number of other high-level functions such as consciousness depend on this, so are at level 7.

The story so far

• In this set of web pages, I show how the brain processes data to create and maintain what I call symbol schemas. These are structures in my brain that represent objects or concepts both in the outside world and in the body.
  • I have constructed a hierarchical structure of seven levels of description to show how coincidence detection, which is a very basic function of neurons and their synapse connections, can create symbol schemas that are representational networks in my brain.
  • Symbol schemas are compressed and idealised versions of reality, they do not include all details, but at their core they are real, relatively stable, networks of neurons.
  • A symbol schema is the only way that a concept has any meaning for me, and I access this model rather than the real thing.
  
• Models or schemas are crucial in my brain.
  • I do not hold any part of the outside world physically within my brain, so the only way I have of understanding the world is to build a model.
  • It doesn’t have to be totally accurate, as long as it includes aspects that are important for my dealing with the outside world.
  • The same is true of my body - I do not hold any part of my body (except my brain) within my brain, so I have to build a model of it to be able to deal with it.
  • In fact, my brain is not “within” my brain, my brain is my brain, so again the only way I can understand it is to build a model of it.
• I then show how exactly the same processing of data inevitably creates a model of the self that I call the self symbol schema.
  • The most basic concept of the self starts from the feeling that comes from the brain connecting to, and controlling, the body, and receiving feedback from it.
  • The next layer that is built on this, and connects closely to it, is the model of the process of attention, which provides self-awareness.
  • The same processing of other internal data from within the brain, that I call cognoception, creates models of other brain processes such as perception, action, memory and free will.
  • Around this, and this can be thought of as another layer, are temporary connections to any of the many thousands of other symbol schemas as are activated and filtered through the process of attention. These appear to me as perceptions, memories or actions. Only one symbol schema can be connected to my self symbol schema at any one time, so this can be visualised as a temporary single spike in one particular direction at any one time.
• The self symbol schema is very large and complex, and has many subsets that can be considered to be symbol schemas in their own right.
  • Like all symbol schemas, it is a compressed and idealised model, so it is not a completely accurate or complete model of my self.
  • Self-awareness is the crucial feature that underpins consciousness.
  • Self-awareness arises from my self symbol schema perceiving itself.

The obvious question

• The obvious question then is: if self-awareness is the self symbol schema perceiving itself, what is it that is doing the perceiving?
  • This is not intended to be a facetious question. My personal experience is that there is something behind the entity that I refer to as “I”: it is always reliably there as soon as I wake up, always the same, solid and unchanging, and it has been the core of “me” since I was a young child, and I assume your experience is the same. So what is it?
  • Many neuroscientists ignored this question for a long time. For many years, consciousness itself was not a topic that was researched¹, so the question was not even asked.
  • Even recent books specifically about consciousness do not ask or answer this question^{2, 3}.
  • Possibly one of the reasons for this is that neuroscientists have considered that this was a question for philosophers or theologians, not for them, although this has begun to change in recent years.
  • The answer must not involve a homunculus or be anything resembling the homunculus argument that, in this case, would require an infinite regress of schemas of schemas. There has to be a valid stopping point and a reason why the infinite regress does not carry on.

The obvious answer

• The inevitable answer to the question “what is doing the perceiving?” is that it is the self symbol schema itself. So my conclusion is that my self symbol schema is not just a model of me, it is me.
  • “I” am not my brain, “I” am only a model or schema in my brain of my brain and its processes.
  • This proposal may be difficult for some people to accept.
    • Some people believe that the soul is supernatural and eternal.
    • Some people believe that the soul is created by a supernatural god.
    • My natural tendency (and, I assume, of everyone else) is to feel that my consciousness is something separate from my brain, because it feels somehow above it, although still connected.
    • This feeling is understandable given that the perspective of being a schema or model is completely transparent to me, or rather it is unknowable to me, because I perceive from within it rather than through it.
    • My model or schema of my self is, like all symbol schemas, an incomplete, imperfect and idealised model of the real thing, but it is all I can know.
  • What I naturally feel is that what I call “I” is a thing that is mysterious, indivisible, intangible and eternal, but that is because this is how the model of my self describes me, and that is all I can know.
  • I have shown on these web pages that I can only perceive or be aware of something for which I already have a symbol schema, or model.
    • So the only way I could be aware that “I” was a schema would be if there was a schema of this schema.
    • But then for me to understand that, there would have to be a schema of the schema of the schema, and so on, ad infinitum.
    • This is not a valid way forward; there is no advantage in there being a schema of the schema.
    • So the inevitable conclusion is that I exist within a model or schema but cannot be inherently aware of the fact.
  • All my perception is from the perspective of being within the self symbol schema; the only things I can truly perceive are within my own self symbol schema; I have no direct access to anything else.
    • While I am awake, the process of attention temporarily connects other activated symbol schemas within my brain to my self symbol schema, which means I can perceive those schemas while they are connected.
    • While any symbol schema is active, the process of reinstatement creates temporary loops to sensory neurons that were activated when the symbol schema was created or updated. These loops also become part of the self symbol schema temporarily, which is how feeling, qualia, emotions and meaning are attached to perceptions (more on this below).
    • This explanation for how feelings, qualia, emotions and meaning come about could go some way to answering the so-called hard problem of consciousness.

How I reached this conclusion

• I first came to the conclusion that “I” had to be a model or schema in August 2021 having read and digested the implications of Michael Graziano’s 2019 book “Rethinking Consciousness”², in which he gives details of his Attention Schema Theory. This proposes that subjective awareness is actually a model of the brain’s process of attention⁴.
  • Graziano provides a very plausible explanation of why self-awareness (or subjective awareness) is the same as a model or schema of attention.
    • I understand and agree with his explanation, but I do not think it is a complete argument.
    • He defines consciousness to be the same as self-awareness, the implication being that the model of attention is the object of self-awareness (although he does not specifically say this), but he says nothing about the subject of the awareness.
    • I agree that self-awareness is a crucial part of consciousness, and I agree that it is the creation of a model or schema of the process of attention that creates self-awareness, but I think we also need to know what it is that is being self-aware.
  • My definition of consciousness is broader than his.
    • My personal experience of consciousness, and therefore my definition of it, also includes memory, feelings (which includes qualia, emotions, pain and meaning), as well as the process of attention itself, not just the part that provides self-awareness.
    • A schema or model of other processes such as perception, action, free will, memory and time are all also important parts of the self symbol schema that contribute to consciousness.
    • However, it is the schema of attention that provides the starting-point for all these other schemas because it creates self-awareness.
• The more I thought about this as a possibility, the more I realised that it answers a number of questions that have puzzled me for many years: what do I mean when I say that I am conscious of something; why am I not able to be conscious of everything that happens in my brain; why are many of the things that I think I am conscious of wrong; and what actually are feelings and emotion and pain?
  • When I am conscious of something, it is either something inside the self symbol schema, or another symbol schema that has been activated and is linked to my self symbol schema via the process of attention.
  • I can only be conscious of the model of the process of attention, so I am only aware of the end result of the process, I am not able to be aware of all of the detailed processing that happens to decide what I become conscious of.
  • Consciousness requires both afferent and efferent connections from the symbol schema of the thing being perceived to the self symbol schema, so a circular network is formed; I cannot be conscious of things that do not have these connections in place.
  • All my perceptions, including perceptions of my own brain processes, are not totally correct or complete, because a symbol schema is a compressed, idealised and generalised version of reality.
  • The so-called hard problem of consciousness, how feeling comes about and why it feels like something to be someone at all, is more easily answered if I am my self symbol schema.
• As mentioned above, my explanation of attention provides an answer to why my knowledge of my own attention is very different from the way that neuroscience explains attention, and a parallel can then be drawn my knowledge of my self.
  • The answer is that I am only aware of a model of attention, a symbol schema, that is an imprecise and compressed version of the real thing, and I cannot know anything about the detail of how attention really works.
  • In an exactly similar way, I cannot know any detail about how “my self” actually works: I can only be aware of a model of it, a schema, and a schema is always a compressed and idealised version of the real thing.
  • If I am that model, then I am also a compressed and imprecise version of my real self, and I can never know the details.
• As far as I am aware, no-one has come up with a reasonable theory that explains how a human brain can have feeling and produce phenomenal consciousness. Most philosophers and neuroscientists either say it is not possible to explain it, or they produce some hand-waving argument that says it is emergent, but are not able to say how or why. This conclusion seems to lead towards an answer.

Others who have almost reached the same conclusion

• When I first came to this conclusion in 2022, I was not aware of anyone else who had stated exactly the same conclusion in any published work.
  • I found this difficult to believe, and, after some searching, I did identify four authors who have come very close. Details of each are in the following paragraphs (there may be others that I am not aware of).
• I had read some papers by the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett in the past, and in 2018 I bought and read her (then new) book “How emotions are made - the secret life of the brain”⁵.
  • This theme of the book is based on her Theory of constructed emotion that proposes that emotions are constructed on the fly at the time they are required rather than being predefined or inherited.
  • She also proposes that “the self” is constructed in a similar way, but at the same time, apparently influenced by Buddhist thinking, states that the self is a fiction⁵.
    • Based on this logic, it seems to me that she should be saying that all emotions are a fiction as well, but she does not say this.
    • Just because something is constructed on the fly, I don’t see why that means it doesn’t exist as a real and physical thing.
  • However, it wasn’t until 2023 that I spotted that in online notes that accompany the book, with reference to her statements about the self being a concept, she says “the self concept, in a given moment, is the self”⁶.
    • This statement appears to contradict the book, and appears not to have been picked up, referenced, or quoted by anyone else.
    • I think the qualification “in a given moment” means that the self is a concept that is built “on the fly”, in other words, it has no permanence.
    • I do not know how soon after the book was published this was written, but the text has been on the web page since at least November 2019.
• In December 2022 I came upon by chance a book written in 2003 by the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger that comes very close to the same conclusion^{7, 8}, but does not quite get there.
  • Metzinger’s name for what I call the self symbol schema is the “Phenomenal Self-Model” (PSM), phenomenal being used in its technical sense of meaning “perceptible by the senses”, although in this case it is not a sense in the standard meaning, but the internal sense of “knowing”⁹.
  • However, Metzinger stops just short of saying precisely that I am my PSM, and actually says that “in a certain metaphorical sense, one could say that you are the content of your PSM.”^{7, 8}
  • Despite saying this, he is very clear that he thinks “the self” does not exist, in fact the title of his book is “Being No One”.
    • His main arguments revolve around the fact that the self-model (PSM) can be relatively easily fooled - he quotes the rubber hand illusion and out-of-body experiences (which he himself has experienced).
    • Metzinger acknowledges that a self-model exists, but he does not give any hints on how it is built, what it actually consists of and how it is used in practice.
  • Metzinger draws on the previous work of Philip Johnson-Laird¹⁰ and Kenneth Craik¹¹ concerning mental models - see model of my world.
• The neuroscientist Anil Seth published a book in 2021 called Being You¹². This title would appear to be a total contrast to the book discussed above by Metzinger entitled “Being No One”, but actually Seth’s conclusion is almost exactly the same as Metzinger’s.
  • In brief, Seth calls perception “controlled hallucinations”, and since the self is also a perception, the self is also a “controlled hallucination”.
  • He suggests, as Metzinger does, that one of the main pieces of evidence for this is that the self can easily be fooled, or disassembled.
  • On re-reading this book, I found that Seth refers to Metzinger’s book discussed above “Being No One”, calling it a brilliant book and saying that it is “a powerful deconstruction of the singular self”. He also goes on to point out, as Barrett does in her book discussed above, that Buddhists philosophy argues “that there is no such thing as a permanent self”¹³, and almost seems to be using this fact to support his conclusion.
• Another writer who has come close is Douglas Hofstadter.
  • In his 1979 book “Godel, Escher, Bach”, he clearly states that there has to be a self-symbol in the brain and says that this creates self-awareness, which closely resembles consciousness, and that the self-symbol can “play the role of 'soul'”¹⁴.
  • His later book “I am a strange loop” of 2007 covers this subject in a lot more detail and says “there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern... that gives rise to what feels like a self”¹⁵, but he also says that the self-symbol is an abstraction that seems immensely real, and that “I” am a mirage or hallucination that perceives itself.
• These four writers seem to be clear that a self-symbol exists, and that there is a clear link between it and our phenomenal self (what we think of as “I”, the thing that has thoughts and feelings), but they seem reluctant to jump the final hurdle and say that “I am” that self symbol, and instead say that it is a fiction, an illusion, a hallucination or a mirage. Why is this?
  • The main reason I think is that they do not consider what the self-symbol actually consists of, and how it is constructed and maintained. I have tried to define symbol schemas as completely as possible, and have shown how they can be constructed and maintained, and then shown how the self symbol schema can be constructed and maintained in exactly the same way. These writers seem to be assuming that the self symbol is some sort of ephemeral entity that is created as required and has no physical reality.
  • Another is perhaps the fear of standing out from the crowd, or even being ridiculed. However, the four writers come from different fields, they are a psychologist, a philosopher, a neuroscientist and a polymath, so this seems unlikely.
  • In the past, neuroscientists perhaps have been put off proposing a conclusion like this because it was seen to an area for philosophers or psychologists, but the attitudes now are different.
  • The main argument of Feldman Barrett is that the self is a transitory entity, as are all emotions. My proposal is that all symbol schemas, including the self symbol schema, are a core that represents the highest level of abstraction or compression of data relating to the concept or object that is represented. Individual instances of encounters with the concept or object are then built around this core with connections to other symbol schemas that provide the context. In many cases, these connections, if they are new, then become part of the core of the symbol schema. So I agree that instances of encounters (including emotions) are built “on the fly”, but this does not mean that the core symbol schema does not exist or have real effect.
  • The main arguments of both Metzinger and Seth are that the self-model is easily fooled or disassembled, but my argument is that this is to be expected and it is the case for any symbol schema. I have argued in my discussion of illusions that these are evidence that symbol schemas, including the self symbol schema, are compressed and incomplete versions of reality, so can easily be wrong.

My self is real, I am not an illusion

• The proposal that the self does not exist, as argued by at least two of the writers discussed above, seems to me to be a very negative position that is also unlikely to lead to any further developments or useful research. My position is that my self is as real to me as anything else in the world, and, in some senses, it is more real.
  • How real is a frisbee?
    • A frisbee is a real thing in the real world.
    • I have a symbol schema in my brain that is the representation of a frisbee in my brain.
    • The symbol schema for frisbee is a real network of real synapses connecting real neurons.
    • Yes, the network can change sometimes, but there is a core of neurons and synapses that almost never changes.
    • To me, the activation of the symbol schema of a frisbee is a frisbee; this is the only way I have of perceiving a frisbee.
  • Similarly, how real is my self?
    • My self is a real thing in my brain because it is a huge network of real synapses connecting real neurons.
    • I have a self symbol schema in my brain that is the representation of my self in my brain.
    • The self symbol schema that represents my self is the same network.
    • Yes, it can and will change sometimes, but there is a core that almost never changes.
    • To me, the activation of the self symbol schema is me; this is the only way I have of perceiving my self.
  • My conclusion, therefore, is that my self is at least as real as most other things are real.
    • The representation of my self is at least as real to me as the representation of a frisbee, or a tree or a molecule or any other concrete thing in the real world.
    • The representation of my self is also at least as real as a cloud, the economy, government, or any other complex emergent feature that has cause and effect.
    • My self is more real to me than beauty, goodness, liberty or any other emergent, non-concrete concepts that do not have direct cause and effect.
  • There are two other reasons why my self is even more real than any of these other things.
    • Firstly, my self is always with me and has been with me since I existed. Everything else and everyone else in the world is potentially transitory, but I am a constant, so my self feels more permanently real to me than anything else.
    • Secondly, it is useful to compare my representation of my self in my own brain with the representation of me in the brains of my friends and family members.
    • My version of me has subjective feelings. Everybody else’s version of me does not have this quality (why? - because they do not model themselves).
    • Subjective feelings make my self even more real to me.
    • My version of me will no longer exist when I die, but the other versions of me will continue to exist in other people’s brains.

The implications

• If it is true that “I” am my self symbol schema, then it is also true that:
  • “I” was created by own brain during the period from before birth up to around 2-3 years old.
  • Before “I” was complete, so before the age of 2-3, I existed as a body and a brain without self-awareness and with unconscious reactions. The number of symbol schemas in my brain would have been continuously increasing, soon followed by the process of attention, and finally the model of attention that builds self-awareness.
  • “I” will cease to exist when I die, or effectively earlier if I should suffer from a brain disease or trauma that causes my self symbol schema to no longer function in the way it currently does.
• If it is true that “I” am an incomplete and imperfect model of me and my brain processes, then perhaps it is easier for me to understand what it must be like if I were an even-more-imperfect-than-normal model of myself, or maybe an even-more-perfect-than-normal model of myself.
  • Autism would seem to be largely a problem in which the model does not get formed to the same extent as normal, or possibly in the same way as normal.
  • People with autism must have as many difficulties understanding themselves as they do understanding others.
  • On the other hand, my incomplete and imperfect knowledge of my own self is all I know, and all I can know, and this must be true for everyone, however imperfect their level of modelling.
  • Maybe there are others whose self-model is a lot more accurate and complete than mine. Does that give them an advantage? Perhaps in certain areas, but maybe not in all areas.
• If it is true that “I” am a schema, that has been created at the top of a hierarchical stack of levels of description, then there is no way that “I” can be aware of any of the details that reside at lower levels of that stack.
  • It is impossible for “me”, the schema, to understand anything about my own brain merely from introspection, all I can report on is the contents of the model.
  • However, it is possible for “me” to be able to change lower levels of the model, over time. I can do this by focussing my attention in the required direction, so producing a top-down influence on the end result of attention, whether it is a perception, action or memory.
  • This is what I do all the time when learning a new skill.
    • At first I have to pay attention and concentrate, but over time the actions become automatic, they are no longer using the self symbol schema. In everyday language, they have become subconscious actions.
    • Once this method is in place, it is more efficient because it can be done much more quickly and with less effort.
    • Think of learning to drive, learning to play tennis, or learning a musical instrument, but exactly the same principles apply to learning a new way of thinking, or changing a habit.
    • The real skill is learning how to move from the position of doing something consciously to the position of being able to do it unconsciously, which can be difficult to do.
    • Practice is clearly a large part of it, but there must be certain ways or techniques of practice that would help in this process.
    • I find that if I think consciously about something that has been learnt, I then cannot do it properly.
  • This “downward causation” is the source of my feeling of free will.
• If “I” am my self symbol schema, then all the things I feel, including qualia, emotions, meaning and pain, must be generated and experienced within the model.
  • There is a valid philosophical question as to how or why a schema can experience “feeling” at all, but it seems to me that it is more feasible than any other explanation I have ever heard or read about of how feelings are experienced.
  • But what do I actually mean by “feeling”? All I know, and all I can know, is that “I” experience something I call “feelings” in relation to symbol schemas that are connected to, and become temporarily part of, my self symbol schema.
  • When the symbol schema for a frisbee is not connected to the self symbol schema (i.e. when I am not conscious of it, and am not thinking about it), then I cannot have any feeling about it, and it has no meaning to me.
  • I can forget about a mild pain or a slight emotion temporarily if my attention is on something else. But this is generally not possible for a severe pain or a strong emotion such as anger, because the connection to this feeling is getting priority over all other incoming data and internal thoughts.
  • This is through the process of attention, but probably mediated by hormones and neuromodulation.
  • So feelings only occur when I can be self-aware of them; it is my self symbol schema being aware of itself that allows feelings to happen.
  • Feelings have evolved from what psychologists call affect, feelings about the state of the body, so that the brain has an incentive to protect the body and do what is best for it.
• If “I” am a schema, and “I” have what I call feelings, then clearly it is possible for a model, a schema, to have intrinsic awareness and feelings. There must be a minimum requirement for this to be possible. I think this must include at least the following three areas, but it is not clear exactly what each of these depends on, and to what extent each is needed:
  1. Modelling of the world and the self.
     • This requires what is often called unlimited associative learning, which is the ability to perform many levels of afferent processing on data, so many levels of coincidence detection, many levels of compression, and many levels of abstraction.
  2. Embodied feedback, i.e. a perception/action loop.
     • This requires a body through which the brain can perceive and to which the brain can issue actions. Without a body, it seems to me that feelings and meaning would not exist in the way we understand them.
  3. Self-awareness.
     • This requires a model of attention, and therefore requires attention. It is unclear whether self-awareness could exist without attention.
• If “I” am a schema and “I” am conscious, how do I know whether someone else or something else is conscious? How do I know that I am conscious in the same way as you think you are?
  • There are no obvious answers to these questions!

Conclusions

• The ideas I have proposed on these webpages make clear that every symbol schema, including the self symbol schema, consists of a real network of real neurons and real synapses, so is a real thing that exists. It produces real effects such as feelings, and has real influence, such as action, which could not happen if it were not real.
  • So I am convinced that “I” am real, I am not an illusion or a mirage!
• A question that could be asked is: how can a symbol schema, a model, possibly be conscious and have thoughts and feelings? Isn’t it more likely, and a better fit with my innate feeling, that “I” am my whole brain and it is my whole brain that has consciousness and thoughts and feelings?
  • Here is a six-point logical argument for why consciousness can only be attained by a schema or model of the self:
    1. Consciousness, as I define it, requires self-awareness - most writers seem to agree with this.
    2. Self-awareness is a thing being aware of itself - this is self-evident.
    3. Awareness of a thing requires a schema, or model, of the thing being perceived - this is proved by features of perception and so-called illusions.
    4. The self is no different from any other thing that is being perceived, so is also represented by a schema - this is perhaps contentious, but illusions of cognoception show that it is true.
    5. Therefore the self is a schema and self-awareness is the self schema being aware of itself.
    6. The conclusion is that only a self schema can be self-aware and therefore only a self schema can be conscious.
  • A more succinct way of saying the same thing in a sentence is as follows:
    • Consciousness requires self-awareness; self-awareness can only happen within a model of the self; therefore consciousness can only happen within a model of the self.
  • If a brain (or any other entity) has a self schema it does not mean that it will necessarily create consciousness, at least not the kind of consciousness that I am familiar with.
    • An attention schema is the first requirement for self-awareness, so if there is no attention, there would seem to be no possibility of self-awareness and therefore no consciousness.
    • Memory is also required for consciousness, so if this is missing, consciousness would not be the same as I experience.
    • Is consciousness without memory? Yes, it may be, but only to a very limited extent. There are some very sad cases (the most famous one is probably Clive Wearing) of people with severe amnesia who do claim to be conscious on a moment-by-moment basis, but as they form no memories they have no feeling of continuity, so no on-going consciousness.
    • Feeling is required for human consciousness, and feeling requires a body for the brain to reside in, so without this, consciousness would certainly be very different from what I experience. With no feeling, there would not be anything that it feels like to be that person, and this is one of the definitions of consciousness that many people use.
• I have detailed how I reached the conclusion that “I”, or what some people might call “soul”, is the same as my self symbol schema.
  • This conclusion seems to provide answers to a number of otherwise difficult questions.
  • The implications of the conclusion may be disturbing for some people.
  • It doesn’t change my attitude to life or change the way I behave in any way.

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References For information on references, see structure of this website - references

1. ^ Fundamental Neuroscience ed. Squire, Bloom, Spitzer, du Lac, Ghosh and Berg - Academic Press, Elsevier, Third edition 2008 or see GoogleScholar.
   Chapter 53 “Consciousness” - Koch
   Page 1223, second paragraph: “Note that it is not yet generally accepted that consciousness is an appropriate subject of scientific inquiry. A number of neuroscience textbooks provide extended details about brains over hundreds of pages yet leave out what it feels like to be the owner of such an awake brain, a remarkable omission.”'
2. ^ ^ Rethinking Consciousness - Graziano 2019 Norton & Company USA - or see GoogleScholar.
   This basis of this book is that self-awareness is created by the brain creating a model of the process of attention, which is (at least part of) a model of self, but it does not make the final leap to say that this model is the self, the very soul of a person.
3. ^ The Consciousness Instinct - Gazzaniga published by Farrer, Straus and Giroux 2018
   Review of The Consciousness Instinct
   Although this book is an interesting review of the history of consciousness research, the basic premise of the book, succinctly stated in the title, provides no advantage or explanation at all. It contains good summaries of the explanatory gap, emergence and layers of explanation, but there is almost nothing about a model of the self.
4. ^ The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness - Webb and Graziano 2015
   doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   From the abstract on page 1: “The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom-up influence and partly under top-down control. We propose that the top-down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the 'attention schema', in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the 'body schema'. The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience.”
5. ^ ^ How emotions are made - The secret life of the brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017 Pan Books (UK) or see GoogleScholar.
   This book, as the title suggests, is mostly about the construction of emotions, but it touches on many other areas, and does discuss the representation of the self.
   Page 191 in chapter 9 entitled “Mastering your emotions”, third paragraph:
   “So in my view, the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like 'Tree', 'Things That Protect You From Stinging Insects', and 'Fear'. ...If the self is a concept, then you construct instances of your self by simulation. ...How does your brain keep track of all the varied instances of your 'Self'...? Because one part has remained constant: you’ve always had a body. Every concept you have ever learned includes the state of your body (as interoceptive predictions) at the time of learning. Some concepts involve a lot of interoception, such as 'Sadness', and others have less, such as 'Plastic Wrap', but they’re always in relation to the same body. So every category you construct - about objects in the world, other people, purely mental concepts like 'Justice', and so on - contains a little bit of you. This is the rudimentary mental basis of your sense of self. ...I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world.”
   Page 190 last paragraph:
   “Buddhism considers the self to be a fiction and the primary cause of human suffering. ... To a Buddhist, a self is worse than a passing physical illness. It is an enduring affliction. My scientific definition of the self is inspired by the workings of the brain yet is sympathetic to the Buddhist view. The self is part of social reality. It’s not exactly a fiction, but neither is it objectively real in nature like a neutron.”
   And page 191, last paragraph:
   “The fiction of the self, paralleling the Buddhist idea, is that you have some enduring essence that makes you who you are. You do not. I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions...”
   
6. ^ Ibid. How emotions are made - The secret life of the brain
   Online notes that accompany the book, second paragraph relating to “Self as a concept”: “... the self is a concept in the same way that anger is a concept: a population of highly variable instances, each one tied to the immediate context or circumstance. The self concept, in a given moment, is the self.”
7. ^ ^ Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity - Thomas Metzinger 2003 or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 299, second paragraph, under the heading “What Is a Phenomenal Self-Model? [(PSM)]”: “The content of the PSM is the content of the conscious self: your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing. They are constituents of your PSM. Intuitively, and in a certain metaphorical sense, one could even say that you are the content of your PSM. All those properties of yourself, to which you can now direct your attention, form the content of your current PSM.”
8. ^ ^ Precis: Being No One - Thomas Metzinger 2003
   downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 3, fourth and fifth paragraphs, under the heading “1.2. The Phenomenal Self”: “First, it is important to understand the central ontological claim put forward by SMT [Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity]: No such things as selves exist in the world. For all scientific and philosophical purposes, the notion of a self - as a theoretical entity - can be safely eliminated. What we have been calling 'the' self in the past is not a substance, an unchangeable essence or a thing (i.e., an 'individual' in the sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representational content: The content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system using it.
   The dynamic content of the phenomenal self-model (hereafter: 'PSM'...) is the content of the conscious self: Your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing. They are constituents of your PSM. All those properties of your experiential self, to which you can now direct your attention, form the content of your current PSM. This PSM is not a thing, but an integrated process. Intuitively, and in a certain metaphorical sense, one could say that you are the content of your PSM. A perhaps better way of making the central point intuitively accessible could be by saying that we are systems that constantly confuse themselves with the content of their PSM. At least for all conscious beings so far known to us it is true that they neither have nor are a self. Biological organisms exist, but an organism is not a self. Some organisms possess conscious self-models, but such self-models certainly are not selves - they are only complex brain states. However, if an organism operates under a transparent self-model, then it possesses a phenomenal self. The phenomenal property of selfhood as such is a representational construct: an internal and dynamic representation of the organism as a whole to which the transparency constraint applies. It truly is a phenomenal property in terms of being an appearance only.”
9. ^ The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self - Thomas Metzinger 2009 or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 4: “'Phenomenal' is used ..., in the philosophical sense, as pertaining to what is known purely experientially, through the way in which things subjectively appear to you.”
10. ^ Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness - Philip Johnson-Laird Cambridge University Press 1983 or see GoogleScholar.
    This book has some helpful and prescient statements about the nature of mental models, and how we can understand them, but also has a lot of less useful detail on the possible methods of processing of logic and language. The general conclusion is that brains do not contain logic or language processing modules, but that they build models of the world and manipulate them to emulate the world. It proposes that there are different types of representations for language, objects in the world and images, and that many common relational concepts are innate. It is non-committal on whether meaning is in the mind or resides in the world and has no useful information on how meaning is represented.
11. ^ The Nature of Explanation - Kenneth Craik Cambridge University Press 1943 or see GoogleScholar.
    
12. ^ Being You - A new science of consciousness - Anil Seth Faber & Faber London 2021
    Page 147, start of chapter entitled “Expect Yourself”: “It may seem as though the self - your self - is the 'thing' that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.”
    Page 153, fourth paragraph: “...the experience of being a unified self can come undone all too easily. The sense of personal identity, built on the narrative self, can erode or disappear entirely in dementia and in severe cases of amnesia, and it can be warped and distorted in cases of delirium”
    Review of “Being You” in The Guardian newspaper - Gaia Vince, published 25th August 2021, 16th paragraph: “The self, then, is another perception, a controlled hallucination built up from an assemblage of perceptual best-guesses, prior beliefs and memories.”
13. ^ Ibid. Being You - A new science of consciousness
    Pages 149-150 in chapter 8 “Expect yourself”: “The idea that the self is somehow indivisible, immutable, transcendental, 'sui generis' [unique], is baked into the Cartesian ideal of the immaterial soul that still carries a deep psychological resonance, especially in Western societies. ... Kant, in his 'Critique of Pure Reason', argued that the concept of the self as a 'simple substance' is wrong, and Hume talked about the self as a 'bundle' of perceptions. Much more recently, the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger wrote a very brilliant book called 'Being No One' - a powerful deconstruction of the singular self. Buddhists have long argued that there is no such thing as a permanent self and through meditation have attempted to reach entirely selfless states of consciousness.”
14. ^ Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Penguin Books UK 1979 or see GoogleScholar.
    This fascinating book, despite its title, is mostly about the functioning of the brain, although it covers many other subjects as well.
    Pages 385 to 387 under the heading “Subsystems”: “There is no reason to expect that 'I', or 'the self', should not be represented by a symbol. In fact, the symbol for the self is probably the most complex of all symbols in the brain. ...it functions almost as an independent 'subbrain', equipped with its own repertoire of symbols which can trigger each other internally. ...'Subsystem' is just another name for an overgrown symbol, one which has gotten so complicated that it has many subsymbols which interact among themselves. Thus, there is no strict level distinction between symbols and subsystems. ...the border is fuzzy.
    Page 387 to 388 under the heading “The self-system and consciousness”, first paragraph: “A very important side effect of the self-subsystem is that it can play the role of 'soul', in the following sense: in communicating constantly with the rest of the subsystems and systems in the brain, it keep track of what symbols are active, and in what way. This means that it has to have symbols for mental activity - in other words, symbols for symbols, and symbols for the actions of symbols. ...this way of describing awareness - as the monitoring of brain activity by a subsystem of the brain itself - seems to resemble the nearly indescribable sensation which we know and call 'consciousness'. ...it seems that the only way one could make sense of the world surrounding a localized animate object is to understand the role of that object in relation to the other objects around it. This necessitates the existence of a self-symbol;”
15. ^ I am a strange loop - Douglas Hofstadter 2007 Basic Books or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 95, under the heading “Where the Buck Seems to Stop”: “The thesis of this book is that in a non-embryonic, non-infantile human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern... that gives rise to what feels like a self.”
    Page 180, under the heading “A Pearl Necklace I Am Not”: “The strange loop making up an 'I' is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist 'inside' an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn’t mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness! An 'I' loop, like an audio feedback loop, is an abstraction - but an abstraction that seems immensely real, almost physically palpable, to beings like us...”
    Page 181, under the heading “I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol”: “Accordingly, the 'I' symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.”
    Pages 182-3, under the heading “The Slow Buildup of a Self”: “We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on this basic pedestal, we soon develop a sense for our bodies as flexible physical objects.”
    Page 188, under heading “...But Am I Real?”: “And so I ask you, dear reader, are temperature and pressure real things, or are they just 'façons de parler' [ways of speaking]? Is a rainbow a real thing, or is it nonexistent?... And thus it is with this notion of 'I'. Because it encapsulates so neatly and so efficiently for us what we perceive to be truly important aspects of causality in the world, we cannot help attributing reality to our 'I' and to those of other people - indeed, the highest possible level of reality.”
    Page 315, under the heading “Double or Nothing”: “Ultimately, the 'I' is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own.”: A review of “I am a strange loop” by Hofstadter - Tom Siegfried 2012, 12th paragraph:
    “But consciousness is more than just an ordinary feedback loop. It’s a strange loop, which Hofstadter describes as a loop capable of perceiving patterns in its environment and assigning common symbolic meanings to sufficiently similar patterns. ... Floods of raw sensory data trigger perceptions that fall into categories designated by 'symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world,' Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the 'power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.' Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. 'You and I are mirages that perceive themselves,' Hofstadter writes. This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. It has no access to the workings of nerve cells and neurotransmitters, the microscopic electrochemical machinery of neurobiological life.”

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