Consciousness as Self-Simulation

The most unsettling move in Joscha Bach’s philosophy of mind is also its most productive: the claim that only a simulation can be conscious. The common intuition runs the other way—a simulation is by definition the unreal thing, and only the solid physical reality it represents could host something as vivid as experience. Bach’s argument is that this intuition has the situation precisely inverted. You have no direct access to the physical world. What you have access to is a model, a real-time simulation that your brain constructs from the meager data your senses provide. The colors, the sounds, the felt solidity of objects—all of it is generated. You live inside the model, not in the world the model represents. From here the conclusion follows: if everything you experience is a feature of a simulation the brain runs, then consciousness too is a feature of that simulation rather than of the physical substrate