I couldn't agree more. I think our Umwelt is formed by our senses, especially the touch: our skin allows us to form a model, in our brain, of our body, and its

I couldn't agree more. I think our Umwelt is formed by our senses, especially the touch: our skin allows us to form a model, in our brain, of our body, and its movement abilities. That's the reason why we have the Phantom Limb phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb I think that the brain doesn't simply do pattern matching, it also forms models of things based on external stimuli, and then does pattern matching on properties of those models. And this model constitutes a small 'universe' inside our brains, with us at the center. And that's how consciousness emerges: we know of an entity that is us because our brain has an object in it that represents us. In your Breakout example, there is really no formation of object 'paddle' inside the 'AI' that plays the game, and hence if the paddle is actually changed even by little, the algorithm doen't know how to handle it. Whereas, in our brain, we see the pixels on the screen as an actual paddle representation, and hence we can easily play any version of Breakout no matter how the paddle looks. EDIT: Same thing with the Vision sense: seeing things allows us to build 3d models of things in our brain. And then we can look at a photograph and recognize objects, because we have these models in our brain.