The model-fitting hypothesis says that the conscious self, the perceived self that I experience as having intentionality, as being free to make choices, as planning things and taking decisions, must, like any other percept, arise from an internal model: the single internal model that my brain fits to my real, biologically diverse, multi-component, multifariously subtle self.
Neuroscience vs Free Will » IAI TV Monday, December 16, 2013 @ 10:11pm
As Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart have aptly put it, the brain viewed from outside looks more like a committee, composed of different parts that evolved at different times for different purposes, echoed in common experience: “something tells me that....”, “my head says one thing but my heart another”, and so on. Yet “I am utterly convinced that there is only one me... not some kind of committee”. The model-fitting hypothesis makes sense of this paradox: the brain has multifarious parts, but only one self-model.
However diverse our internal make-up may be, in order to survive we need, continually, to make sense of our surroundings and our own location and orientation in those surroundings. So the repertoire of internal models and sub-models that are used to construct the perceived world, with its stationary and moving objects, has to include a self-model. Simultaneously with other models, this has to be fitted to the incoming sensory data including, now, internal data from one's own body, such as proprioceptive data about limb positions.
The end result is a single spatio-temporal model of oneself in one's surroundings.
