Episode Details

Douglas Harding says that what I am is two fold. Who I am for others depends on the range of the observer. Who I am for myself is wide open awareness. In today’s episode, we look at a paper by Anil Seth and Manos Tsakiris titled “Being a beast machine: the somatic basis of selfhood” where they explore who I “think” am, or more specifically the model of “me” that I predict that I am.

The parts of this that stand out to me are that I don’t perceive a given world and passively take it in as it is. I predict what the world will be and then adjust my predictions constantly. Similarly, I don’t “have” a self that I’m sensing, I’m predicting a self as a way of regulating the many processes involved in staying alive as an organism. In this way the sense of “self” is like other senses, it is something I am predicting will occur and I’m constantly experiencing the prediction.

The feeling of being "me" is what I think it would feel like if I actually were a "me", whatever that is.