Self-awareness evolves in intimate dialogue with the social world since it is a feature of  an essential mode of functioning by which we communicate with others and with the collectivity, and with ourselves, about status and intentions. Status here means both state of mind, feelings, body and so on, and more importantly, pecking-order. We learn much or most about ourselves in considering how acceptable we are to, and how favourably we are viewed by, others. But self-awareness also has a metaphysical component, or seems to, in that we believe that we exist to the degree that we are aware of ourselves. And thus it is that the two sides of self-awareness become confused and our existence becomes equivalent to our status, to our unique definability relative to some collective. Add to this the fact that the collective now extends vastly beyond the field of others with whom we interact or might conceivably interact, and opportunities for compounding the error are greatly multiplied.