What is a conscious self-model, a PSM? It’s the instantiation basis of the phenomenal properties to be explained on the representational level. It’s the set of properties you have to have to get the conscious experience of being someone. It is an episodically active representational entity, the content of which is formed by properties of the system itself. A self-model is a model of the system in which it occurs as a whole.
The phenomenal self-model is that part of the mental self-model which is currently embedded into the highest-order integrated representational structure: your global model of the world. So the content of consciousness at any one instant is the content of a global model of the world. And that partition of your self-model that is integrated into that is what you now experience as your conscious self.
What determines your conscious experience is determined once all your internal properties and your contemporaneous properties are fixed.
It is something that depicts a possibility. You experience it as a reality, but it’s actually only the best hypothesis the system has about its own current state.
Expert skiers extend their body image to the tip of their ski. A good car racer doesn’t have to look if he fits through there because he just feels it. Whatever we integrate into our self-model is what we perceive as belonging to ourselves.
This thing, this little pocket computer representation, is transparent for you because, try as hard as you may, you will not be able to experience this as a representational state in your visual system. It’s so fast, it’s so flexible, it has such a high temporal resolution, you just get the end result: this little black thing. So you cannot experience it as a representation, and you become a naïve realist. You actually think you’re directly in contact with your environment right now.
We are a system that looks through their own representational structures as if they were in direct and immediate contact with their content.
Naïve realism has been a functionally adequate background assumption for systems like ourselves. It was just not necessary to pay the additional metabolic price to go to the effort to also know that this is a representation occurring in you. For the evolutionary purposes it was enough to experience the fact that there is this object out there.
We are systems which are not able to recognize their own sub-symbolic self-model as a model. Therefore, to coin a metaphor, we operate under the condition of what I call a naïve realistic self-misunderstanding: we necessarily experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves.
The core content of consciousness is never a thing, but a relation.
