The Positional Self: Consciousness as a Condition of Self-Involving Anticipation

This working paper proposes the concept of the positional self as a functional structure required for self-involving, action-guiding anticipation. It argues that some forms of future-directed simulation require more than predictive modelling: they require a first-person anchor from which a future scenario can be inhabited as mine. The paper connects this argument to mental time travel, autonoetic consciousness, first-person contents, de se attitudes, predictive processing, exaptation, and the author's Orientation Theory. It remains deliberately limited: it does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness and does not argue that all anticipation is conscious. Its claim concerns the narrower class of anticipatory simulations in which the acting subject must be represented as the future bearer of action. Version 0.2 is a revised concept note.