(I prefer not to use that term, because there is ample evidence that when we name a phenomenon, especially with a noun, we endow it with essences and special powers, leading us down the temping and ill-begotten path of essentialism. This captures the intuitions of many scientists and philosophers, most notably Antonio Damasio who calls this the protoself. This is the rudimentary basis of a sense of self. Statistical patterns of sensations don’t just represent something in the world - they represent something in the world in relation to something else - your body. Your brain creates experiences of the world and plans actions in the world in relation to your own body. This is because the prediction errors about the sensations from your body are part of every pattern of every single category that you have learned since birth. So every concept your brain creates, every categorization it completes, contains some information about your body. that your brain creates with predictions contains information about body budgeting. Think of it this way: Your brain creates an internal model of the world from the perspective of someone with your body. It is a goal-based concept that is constructed on the fly, as needed. The self concept, in a given moment, is the self. I, along with my colleague Larry Barsalou, think that the self is a concept in the same way that anger is a concept: a population of highly variable instances, each one tied to the immediate context or circumstance. Most of these questions, I think, come from a misunderstanding of the nature of concepts and categories. For example, for the past fifty years or so, social psychologists have debated: Is the self-concept a fixed, unchanging entity? Is it a theory, a set of ideas that people have about the nature of self, the world and the relation between the two? Is there one single self or are there multiple selves? Is the self changing or fixed? Does memory construct the self, or does the self construct memory? But these are all questions about the self concept (is the concept classical, with necessary and sufficient features, a prototype, a set of exemplars, etc.), usually with the underlying assumption the concept is separate from the thing itself (i.e., the category of things that make you who you are). Psychologists usually assume that the self exists, and that it is something you can have a concept about. in my view, the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like “Tree,” “Things That Protect You from Stinging Insects,” and “Fear.” The self is a concept, but not in the way that social psychologists mean it.

How emotions are created