I know that when I look at my hand, the experience is not as immediate and straight-forward as it seems. It's not me "looking at my hand" -- if by 'me' I mean my conscious self. Instead, my brain is putting together an image of my hand based on sensory information it is receiving from my eye. Nor is it even so simple as "it is me that is aware of a constructed image of my hand". Because the part of me that 'sees' the image is still not my conscious 'me'. What is actually going on is that I imagine 'myself' seeing my hand -- that is, I imagine a 'me' and I imagine this 'me' is seeing a hand. So when I think about it quite carefully, I realize that when I think to myself that I am seeing my hand, this means I am simulating myself seeing a hand.

Since I have been putting a lot of time into learning about what people like to call consciousness this part of the post really leapt out at me.

What am I if I am not the processes that constitute both the physical matter of the brain and the physical patterns that allow the various senses to both operate and combine to produce a model of the outside world (and place me within that model)?

This quote seems to beg this very question. Both Douglas Hofstatder's I am a Strange Loop and Jeff Hawins' On Intelligence maintain that our consciousness is the sum total of the operations that take place in the brain, and that the I that is observing your hand, is just the result of recursive patterns within one's brain.

So, this quote seems to be a strange observation to make for a monist point of view.

This quote reminds me of comments by Searle on how Computationalist or Connectionist theories of mind assert a form of Strong Dualism that really fails to be a criticism of these stances, due to a false implication that these stances are somehow cartesian.