How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self

Our perception of reality continuously develops, adapts, and structures itself throughout our lifetime. However, the fundamental cognitive capacities form during fetal development, infancy, and early childhood. While genetics lays out the general structure of the brain – constraining the flow of information and thus basic neural structures to certain locations in the brain – development and learning shape the actual implementations of inner representations and control structures. Thus, behavior and cognition – including the construction of the self – are products of both individual genetic predispositions and development. If we want to understand the construction of our inner selves, it is consequently essential to study the developmental and learning aspects of cognition in detail. While cognitive, anticipatory approaches to learning and behavior reach back to the 19th century (Herbart 1825; James 1950), behaviorism dominated the field for at least half of the last century. Watson (1913) perceived psychology as a completely determinable subject that was controllable by simple and measurable experiments, restricting himself to reinforcement-based experiments. Skinner (1971) questioned our own capabilities to make actual intelligent decisions in the absence of perceivable reinforcement. Although the insights gained during the behaviorist age were certainly useful, their influence in psychology research prevented many from having a more open mind on the subject. However, some researchers, including the Würzburg School of Psychology (Ach 1905; Stock & Stock 2004) early in the 20th century and Tolman (1932), propagated cognitive approaches to psychological research that acknowledged the existence of inner mental states that guide and control cognition and learning. Only over the last decades, though, have researchers in psychology begun to explicitly acknowledge that behavior is predominantly controlled purposefully by an anticipatory image of the effects, rather than by mere reactions to a given situation or stimulus (J. Hoffmann 1993; H. Hoffmann & Möller 2003; Hommel et al. 2001; von Hofsten 2003, 2004). These insights led to the current belief that anticipatory processes lie at the heart of cognition and learning (Butz & Hoffmann 2002; Butz, Sigaud & Gérard 2003b; Grush 2004; Hesslow 2002; J. Hoffmann 1993; J. Hoffmann et al. 2007; O’Regan & Noë 2001). According to the insights gained, this article proposes that cognition, individuality, and self-consciousness develop on the basis of the principles of anticipation (Rosen 1985, 1991; J. Hoffmann 1993; Butz & Hoffmann 2002). We propose an anticipatory drive , which concurrently biases and guides brain development, decision making, and control. The anticipatory drive has two fundamental effects on brain structuring. First, brain structures are generally predictive, that is, neural structures develop in order to predict the consequences of own behavior and of the external dynamics in the environment. Second, the Martin V. Butz A University of Würzburg