Yes, by deliberative I was taking seriously the notion (from Society of Mind and Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) that our qualia of consciousness may be a q

Yes, by deliberative I was taking seriously the notion (from Society of Mind and Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) that our qualia of consciousness may be a quasifictional single-threaded experience which we tell ourselves to explain actions which we've actually arrived at in a far less totally-ordered manner. On coaching and anxiety as overthinking the future: a big part of dealing with horses is to notice when they're overthinking [the danger in] a situation, and focus their concentration upon activity in the here-and-now, one after the other*, but staying with what needs to be done and not leaving space for anxiety about what might happen. This is difficult for them at first, but gets easier and easier with practice. (one of the aims of both european and "western" training is to get a horse to a point where it can go into the equine equivalent of an on guard position, ready for any movement, not because it is excited but because it is relaxed) [I certainly couldn't arrange all the muscle firings for four legs and a neck to carry both myself and a rider through even a halfway complicated movement, but acting as coach I can help a horse to improve how they do so.] I've also used this focus on myself: one of the better moments of my fencing career was a bout in which I was down 0-9, and said to myself "I'm obviously choking here; time to change something", and so by concentrating solely on winning precisely each current point ("no past no future") eventually won 15-12. * compare https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... which argues that if you have a small mind coping with a wide world, a next-state automaton is both necessary and (insofar as it's the best you can do given the size mismatch) sufficient.