Spilling out what I was thinking at breakfast this morning, deciding to fire it off, probably incomprehensible to most readers, perhaps to attempt to clarify later (or delete!):
My self model or 'I' stands amongst my models of others, and during my early postnatal period I probably formed those other models prior to my own, a yet unknown self discovering and learning to predict the behavior of others to gain feeding and care, and only then composing my own self from parts of them. This is consonant with Graziano's take on consciousness as a perceptual construct ("Consciousness and the Social Brain"), also with Wegner's self as being the emotion of authorship ("The Illusion of Conscious Will") and with Metzenger's emotions as evolved virtual organs analogous to the hardware of the liver or kidney ("The Ego Tunnel"). Perhaps the closest we come to a 'real fundamental self' is the experience of occupancy of an expanded space (of non-dual consciousness) that feels to be the container for all of this.
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