Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness: From Cartesian Duality to Markovian Monism.

The paper traces philosophical and scientific accounts of consciousness from Descartes' mind-body dualism to a modern framework called Markovian monism, which treats consciousness as a property of certain physical systems described by Markov blankets. It argues that sentience—the capacity for subjective experience—can be understood as an inference process in which an organism or system models its environment and itself. The work synthesizes ideas from philosophy, neuroscience, and computational theory to propose that consciousness is not a separate substance but emerges from the dynamics of self-organizing systems that maintain boundaries with their surroundings.

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Abstract

Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness: From Cartesian Duality to Markovian Monism.