Consciousness is sometimes described as the ineffable separation between the subjective and objective worlds. Battaglia et al (2025) proposed that this arises due to a Markov blanket – an informational boundary that gives us two incompatible views of our minds: a view from the inside, that can never fully align with the view of ourselves from the outside. In response, we suggest that any motivated, active organism will form such inferences about itself (Parr & Manohar, Physics of Life Rev 2025). This leads to ‘constrained confabulation‘ — constructed narratives that explain and drive our behaviour, using causal objective language to re-describe our mental processes.
