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TheOtherDave comments on The Protagonist Problem - Less Wrong
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My only real exposure to the recursive self-symbol idea has been through Hofstadter's I am a strange loop and perhaps Dennett's Consciousness explained. (Maybe one should refuse to put these in the same category as the research mentioned in this post though.)
The material on blindsight and anosognosia forced out a confusion in my understanding of the idea. You write that blindsight is "where someone is able to see, but don't represent themselves as seeing." It is natural to ask, why don't they just update their self-model? So I guess that the self-model must be partially accessible to conscious read/writing, and partially accessible only to subconscious read/writing. Maybe only the former is characteristic of human-style consciousness. So the recursive arrow pointing from the self-symbol to itself needs to be unpacked into multiple arrows representing these different types of access.
Well, a lot depends on how precise I want my description to get. The conscious/subconscious distinction is a very high-level approximation; when I get down into the details it's not especially useful. There are a lot of more-or-less independent processes, some of which have self-monitoring functions (and can therefore be considered "part of the self-model") to varying degrees in varying contexts, with varying degrees of cognitive permeability and conscious control.
More generally, I find it often helps to think of my mind as a collection of individual agents with goals that are not quite aligned (and sometimes radically opposed). So, sure, the "self-symbol" "modifies itself" in lots of different ways, just like the U.S.Senate does, but there's nothing mysterious about that... it's what you expect from a system with lots of moving parts that interact with one another.