Ricardo Forcano with Claude Cowork at Map of Consciousness:
Centre of narrative gravity — Daniel Dennett
Complementarily to his multiple drafts theory, Daniel Dennett proposed that the self — that character we refer to when we say “I” — is a “narrative centre of gravity”. Just as the centre of gravity of an object is a useful fiction (it is not an atom of the object, but a virtual point that allows physical predictions to be made), the self is a useful fiction that the brain produces to organize conduct and communication.
The narrative self is the protagonist of a story the brain constantly tells. It integrates memories into a coherent biography, projects plans into the future, attributes decisions to a responsible agent, sustains an inner voice that dialogues with itself. But that protagonist does not exist as such; it is an emergent effect of multiple narrative processes that converge.
The metaphor is powerful because it dissolves the homunculus problem. There is no inner self that interprets experience: neural processes generate small narratives (the memory of this morning, the expectation of lunch, the deliberation about this decision), and the self is the virtual convergence point of all those narratives, not an additional element.
This and other theories here. And also have a look at the Unification Proposal section there.
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