Abstract: Mental representations of selfhood are ultimately grounded in representations of the body, with the internal physiological milieu providing a primary reference –a material me that supports adaptive interaction with the environment. (Anil Seth 2013)

If there is a consensus in interdisciplinary work on the mind at the moment it is that self awareness is a form of bodily awareness underpinned by interoception (representation of states of the internal milieu). Seth is quite clear that he is offering an empirically based anti-Cartesian account of self representation and self-awareness “that explains the distinctive phenomenology of embodied selfhood, accounting for its non-object-like character and subjective stability over time.”

Like Seth, Jakob Hohwy and John Michael rely on a predictive coding account of interoception to explain self-representation and awareness. However they describe their account as essentially a “narrative account”. At the same time they suggest that the narrative creates the feeling of being a persisting entity with an object-like character “agents model the self as a hierarchy of hidden, endogenous causes, and further, that the self is identical to these causes”

So there is a clear contrast between these interoceptive predictive coding accounts over whether the mind represents the self as a continuing unified entity: an object. The contrast can be explained in terms of a technicality within predictive coding (active versus perceptual inference). However framing it that way obscures its philosophical import. It is actually a debate between top down feature binding and tracking accounts of interoception. Seeing the issue that way allows us to reexamine whether and how interoceptive accounts get any traction on venerable philosophical debates about the substantial status of the self.