I am therefore I think
This article offers an account of embodied exchange with the world that associates conscious operations with actively inferring the causes of our sensations. Its agenda is to link formal (mathematical) descriptions of dynamical systems to a description of perception in terms of beliefs and goals. The argument has two parts: the first calls on the lawful dynamics of any (weakly mixing ergodic) system that persists in a changing environment from a single cell organism to a human brain. These lawful dynamics suggest that (internal) states can be interpreted as modelling or predicting the (external) causes of sensory perturbations. In other words, if a system exists, its internal states must encode probabilistic beliefs about external states. Heuristically, this means that if I exist (am) then I must have beliefs (think) The second part of the argument is that the only tenable beliefs I can entertain about myself are that I exist. This may seem rather facile; however, if we associate existing with ergodicity, then (ergodic) systems that exist by predicting external states can only possess prior beliefs that their environment is predictable. It transpires that this is equivalent to believing that the world and the way it is sampled will minimise uncertainty about the causes of sensations. We conclude by illustrating the behaviour that emerges under these beliefs using simulations of saccadic searches and considering them in the light of conscious perception.