Came across an intriguing paper recently. It postulated that consciousness might emerge when an organism can form a predictive simulation of both its body and surroundings, an approach akin to model-based reinforcement learning (RL). This is distinctly different from merely reacting to the environment, a characteristic of model-free RL.

> What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520084113

Maybe consciousness is the self&world-simulator.