Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses.

look over there, what sensory data am I likely to encounter?” Such predictions are called “conditional” predictions—predictions about what would happen were something to be the case.

brains—and conscious minds—as embodied and embedded systems.

Perceptual predictions play out across many scales of space and time, so that we perceive a structured world full of objects, people, and places.

we behave so that we end up perceiving things in a particular way.

Being alive means being in a condition of low entropy.

The feeling that I could have done differently does not mean that I actually could have done differently. Rather,

Then there’s conscious self—the specific experience of being you,

Let’s consider three core components of prediction error minimization in the brain: generative models, perceptual hierarchies, and the “precision weighting” of sensory signals.