Temporal Thickness

> There are many phenomena in the natural sciences that are predicated on the notion of “self”; namely, self-information, self-organization, self-assembly, self-evidencing, self-modeling, self-consciousness and self-awareness. To what extent does one entail the others? This essay tries to unpack the relationship among these phenomena from first (variational) principles. Its conclusion can be summarized as follows: living implies the existence of “lived” states that are frequented in a characteristic way. This mandates the optimization of a mathematical function called “surprise” (or self-information) in information theory and “evidence” in statistics. This means that biological processes can be construed as an inference process; from evolution through to conscious processing. So where does consciousness emerge? **The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action.** This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness. Finally, we will touch on the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness; by asking whether self-consciousness only emerges when inferring or disambiguating the author of my sensations; in other words, “did I cause that or did you?” source

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