sense of self

When we talk about "the self", or having a "sense of self", what do we mean?

There is an interpretation in terms of consciousness - that there is "something it is like to be" me. But usually by 'sense of self' we don't mean a pure witness consciousness. We mean a consciousness that contains a representation of a self-model.

Everything we are conscious of is contained in our world model, including our sense of self. so I think the sense of self is better thought of as a representation of an object in perception. It is a way of organizing perception (not the only way) that takes the intentional stance towards the entity in which the perception is occurring.

in other words:

1. There is a system, an intelligence, that takes perceptual input and ultimately acts (internally by triggering thoughts, and externally with motor commands, etc).
2. These actions are coherent enough that they can be viewed as an agent attempting to accomplish goals - the intentional stance is valid.
3. Probably the system does build an explicit representation of other agents in the environment. This representation allows for planning. We represent other agents as having goals, and even "styles" or "personalities" --- sorts of things they tend to do or say. And this representation is useful because it supports planning. Not always many-steps-deep planning like we think about in a game of chess. But perhaps something more like amortized planning, via conditioning: some sort of 'personality vector' (or really, 'relationship vector', representing the context of our relationship, shared experiences) for the person we're talking to is fed into our language model to shape what we say as we talk.
4. The hypothesis (is there support for this?) is that the sense of self uses the same machinery.