Consciousness is not just experience—it is experience that can take itself as an object. The critical turn occurs when "happening" becomes "happening to me," and later becomes "me noticing myself noticing." William James formalized this as the I/Me split—the knower and the known. This dipole may be consciousness's core dynamic: self-as-observer and self-as-observed, never perfectly still, generating inner life through constant motion. When we start to self-reflect, developing a "theory of mind" about oneself within one's own mind through the eyes of others, as reflected by our own eyes making eye contact in the mirror, something quite remarkable takes place.

The mind—you know I am now talking about me-and-my-mind or you-and-your-mind—the mind is phenomenologically coterminous with consciousness; that is, so far as anything that you can observe or can get anyone else to observe about your mind or his mind, anything that can be sensed and perceived, will be of the same extent as the state of mind called consciosness; and the various ingredients, the contents of consciousness, which cover a wonderful bunch of alleged or real entities, are what one ordinarily means when he talks about his "mental life."

—Harry Stack Sullivan, The Illusion of Individual Personality

Around 15 to 18 months, children recognize their reflection and touch makeup on their own face rather than the mirror's surface (Keromnes et al., 2019). This isn't consciousness's birth—infants are conscious long before—marking when the system can map an image to its own body and treat it as self. The mind reaches a critical mass, a tipping point: "fissile material" accumulates through sensory integration, motor prediction, body maps, and social mirroring until the system sustains a recursive loop. This leads to a cascade of mental events, internal mirroring external, mind mirroring world, the hall of mirrors that makes up reality. A complex, adaptive system.

From then on, as long as the brain is healthy and intact, self becomes self-replicating, sustaining, and to an extent, self-prompting—a mechanistic, information-hungry engine agentially foraging for internal and external experiences. This process maintains coherence by continuously organizing, pruning, and revising a model of........

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