The Positional Self: Consciousness as a Condition of Self-Involving Anticipation
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) July 5, 2026 Kawa, Andreas, Gregor
Some forms of future-directed simulation require a first-person anchor—a positional self—that allows a scenario to be inhabited as mine, not merely predicted. This working paper argues that self-involving, action-guiding anticipation goes beyond predictive modeling, connecting the idea to mental time travel, autonoetic consciousness, de se attitudes, predictive processing, and exaptation. The claim is limited to anticipatory simulations where the acting subject must be represented as the future bearer of action; it does not address the hard problem of consciousness or assume all anticipation is conscious.