Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Social Theories, and Predictive Processing, we introduce a novel framework -the Self-Organizing Metarerpresentational Account (SOMA), in which consciousness is viewed as something that the brain learns to do. The brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. Thus, consciousness is the brain's (unconscious, embodied, enactive, non-conceptual) theory about itself.
We argue that thought insertion primarily involves a disruption of the sense of ownership 22 for thoughts and that the lack of a sense of agency is but a consequence of this disruption. 23 We defend the hypothesis that this disruption of the sense of ownership stems from a fail-
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