The Positional Self: Consciousness as a Condition of Self-Involving Anticipation

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.

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Abstract

This working paper proposes the concept of the positional self as a functional structure required for self-involving, action-guiding anticipation. It argues that some forms of future-directed simulation require more than predictive modelling: they require a first-person anchor from which a future scenario can be inhabited as mine. The paper connects this argument to mental time travel, autonoetic consciousness, first-person contents, de se attitudes, predictive processing, exaptation, and the author's Orientation Theory. It remains deliberately limited: it does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness and does not argue that all anticipation is conscious. Its claim concerns the narrower class of anticipatory simulations in which the acting subject must be represented as the future bearer of action. Version 0.2 is a revised concept note.