text: Extending this idea even further, one can assume that cer- 
  tain emotional states, as well as self-awareness and the (embod- 
  ied) sense of self—and the feeling of continually being the same 
  person—could be constructed similarly: it would be the result of 
  an inferential process that integrates bodily sensations and other 
  experiences over time (Gu et al. 2013, Seth 2013, Stephan et al. 
  2016, Barrett 2017). Figure 1 illustrates graphically this perspective 
  by showing a (schematic) hierarchical generative model that links 
  (exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive) sensations at 
  lower levels with multimodal models of hidden bodily states, such 
  as fatigue and hunger at intermediate layers, and, finally, with 
  temporally extended, integrative models of the emotional and 
  embodied self at the higher hierarchical level. The hierarchical 
  generative model recapitulates a simple predictive coding archi- 
  tecture, which includes various putative brain areas or networks 
  (gray ovals) arranged hierarchically. In the schematic, networks for 
  unimodal (exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive) pro- 
  cessing are situated at the lowest hierarchical level, multimodal 
  networks are at an intermediate level, and networks for process- 
  ing a persistent model of the self are at the highest level. Note 
  that this simple schematic is not supposed to recapitulate brain 
  anatomy but to illustrate the basic principles of hierarchical gen- 
  erative models and predictive coding; (for a discussion of the 
  mapping between predictive coding networks and brain anatomy, 
  see Parr et al. 2022). Each network includes cells encoding predic- 
  tions (black nodes) and prediction errors (red nodes). These units 