"Observation", "experience" and "self-observation"

We can use the two-part structure of consciousness to (re)define some terms:

• "observation", in its broad sense, refers to the first stage of consciousness, in which environmental signals are mapped to a fabricated "world";
• "experience" refers to the second stage of consciousness, in which a behavior-determining system accesses that "world", as well as other sources of information such as memory and imagination.

Thus, observation is not experience, nor experience observation. One consequence of which must be that "self-observation" isn't true observation, but rather a form of experience. That is, one can't really observe oneself, one can only experience oneself.

This last point takes us beyond the stated limits of this project (which is focused on consciousness, as opposed to self-consciousness) -- but it also relates to the way in which we investigate, or even just think about, consciousness per se, and so it's worth pursuing a little. Why is it that self-awareness seems at once to be like observation, but also to be different (especially so, perhaps, in the peculiarly slippery, "glassy", protean qualities of its object)? Let's make a quick hypothesis: the advent of language, or of a token-base communication system, allowed the development of a third "layer" or stage of consciousness, and, in particular, the formation of a "self" which represented the whole of consciousness, an inherently recursive information structure. From the vantage point of this third stage, this self, then, consciousness itself can appear as something observed, even though this construct is entirely within experience, and so has none of the "hardness" or durability of true observation, its self-referential nature making it especially unstable.