The contemporary philosopher-psychologist Thomas Metzinger defends the position I am urging. He argues that our cognitive architecture reflexively creates what he calls a phenomenal self model, that is, a complex representation of a self. That model includes representations of our body, of our current sensory state, of our cognitive processes, and of our orientation to the world, as well as representations of our relation to the past and the future. It represents us as agents, as centers of experience, and as extended in time and in space. And this representation induces a first-person
...more
