I've been following the thoughts on conscious experience of self and have nearly dipped in a couple of times, but lack of clarity on my own thoughts keeps on preventing me. (And Russ, I do love clarity and direct communication.)
I'm still torn between various aspects of the points of view that, mostly, Nick and Russ presented. Though clarity still eludes me, I would like to share the following before it just slips away unused again.
I think things pretty much work as Nick painted them. Still, this set of interacting structures and processes that I think of as myself, can't quite banish from it's processing space the nagging awareness of something like the experiencer that Russ argues for. I wonder if it might arise in the manner outlined below.
I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the environment that is always present, i.e. self.
Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints, vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc. I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.
But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past, when we reconstruct events from memory).
Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.
Regards,
Rikus