passed since I started writing this sentence, the predictive machinery of perception when directed inwardly makes it seem as though there really is a stable essence of ‘me’ at the centre of everything. And in the same way that our perceptions of the world can sometimes lack the phenomenology of being real, the self too can lose its reality. The experienced reality (and subjective stability) of the self may wax and wane during illness, and it can be severely attenuated or even abolished in the psychiatric condition of depersonalisation.
