The Brain's Best Guess

Anil Seth: I think the experience of being you is another kind of controlled hallucination. It's another kind of brain based best guess. The philosopher David Hume had what he called the bundle theory of self, which is the idea that the nature of self is just an ongoing collection of perceptions. And this also happens, in my view anyway, through a process of the brain creating predictions and using them to update sensory signals from the body. Or when making actions to use predictions to overwhelm sensory data so they become self-fulfilling predictions.