“Any time that the mind encounters such a flow of feelings and perceptions, it irresistibly attributes them to some underlying entity that accounts for what’s going on. Just like the play of colours and shapes makes us see a bus careening towards us on the street, when happiness gives way to sadness, the mind infers that ‘someone’ (me) must have experienced a loss. The result is a model of a unified entity that allows us to act, think and interact – especially with other people – coherently and effectively. Self-modelling is simply an optimising strategy that allows us to bind together certain properties of the world so that they’re easier to grasp. By striving to maximise predictive success, the mind irresistibly succumbs to the substantialist temptation.”