ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Am I Self-Conscious? (Or Does Self-Organization Entail Self-Consciousness?).
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed.
- Embodied Neuropsychodynamics of the Relational Self Across Space and Time: An Integrative Narrative Review.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- The neural correlates of shared and individual experience.Communications biology · 2026Article
- From self-organizing systems to subjective temporal extension.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Against (theory-neutral) method (in consciousness science).Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Towards an active inference account of deep meditative deconstruction.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Computational spirits: a neuroscientific account of psychedelic entity encounters.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Article
- It Is Movement All the Way Down: Broken Rhythms and Embodied Selfhood in Depersonalization.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Criticality of Consciousness: Excitatory-Inhibitory Balance and Dual Memory Systems in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Self, Me, or I? Unravelling the Triumvirate of Selfhood in Pathological Consciousness.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Temporal depth in a coherent self and in depersonalization: theoretical model.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Testing the role of spontaneous activity in visuospatial perception with patterned optogenetics.PloS one · 2025Article
- Minding the moving self: the centrality of body movement in the neurodynamics of the self and psychotherapeutic implications.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Review
- Reflective analysis on empirical theories in consciousness.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Mindfulness, cognition, and long-term meditators: Toward a science of advanced meditation.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Resilience phenotypes derived from an active inference account of allostasis.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.Synthese · 2025Article
- Conscious active inference I: A quantum model naturally implements the path integral needed for real-time planning and control.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Review
- An Active-Inference Approach to Second-Person Neuroscience.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Feasibility of a Personal Neuromorphic Emulation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? The answer is yes. So there you have it-the answer is yes. This was my response to a question I was asked to address in a recent AEON piece (https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference). What follows is based upon the notes for that essay, with a special focus on self-organization, self-evidencing and self-modeling. I will try to substantiate my (polemic) answer from the perspective of a physicist. In brief, the argument goes as follows: if we want to talk about creatures, like ourselves, then we have to identify the characteristic behaviors they must exhibit. This is fairly easy to do by noting that living systems return to a set of attracting states time and time again. Mathematically, this implies the existence of a Lyapunov function that turns out to be model evidence (i.e., self-evidence) in Bayesian statistics or surprise (i.e., self-information) in information theory. This means that all biological processes can be construed as performing some form of inference, from evolution through to conscious processing. If this is the case, at what point do we invoke consciousness? The proposal on offer here is that the mind comes into being when self-evidencing has a temporal thickness or counterfactual depth, which grounds inferences about the consequences of
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.