6 ideas
Waking and dreaming are the same intrinsic brain state, generated by the brain itself; the only difference is that in wakefulness sensory input constrains and updates the internal activity, while in dreaming that input is gated off. Perception is therefore not a readout of the world but the brain's own model being corrected by the senses.
Most neural activity is intrinsically generated by neurons with their own oscillatory electrical properties, not triggered by external stimuli. Sensory input does not drive the brain's activity. It modulates an ongoing internal process, much as a push alters the swing of a pendulum that is already moving.
The brain evolved to predict the outcome of movement before it happens, so an organism can act appropriately in a changing environment. The self and the capacity for thought are internalized versions of this predictive motor machinery. Organisms that do not move, such as the sea squirt that digests its own brain once it settles, do not need a nervous system.
Synchronous gamma-band oscillations (around 40 Hz) sweep between the thalamus and the cortex and bind separately processed sensory fragments into a single moment of experience. The nonspecific thalamic system provides the temporal context and the specific system provides the content. Their coincident timing, rather than any single location, produces unified awareness.
The 'I' is not a thing or a place in the brain. It is a centralized abstraction the brain constructs so that its predictions and actions come from one coherent vantage point. Like the calm eye of a vortex, it is a stable pattern created by the dynamics around it rather than an entity that exists on its own.
Thinking is internalized movement: the premotor planning that once directly produced action is run offline as imagined prediction. To save neural computation, the brain packages common movements into fixed action patterns, prewired modules that are triggered as wholes. Emotions are premotor templates of this same kind.