There are simple forms of self-reference such as in the visual-spatial field when objects grow larger as they come closer to your eyes, or sounds become more distinct as you focus your hearing on them, but these never exist in isolation from complex coordinations of distinct self-references - being in a situation, moving around in it, open to inner reflections from memory and imagination, mapping your goals in time and space and through the mediations of possible actions, each with its own history, path-dependent updates of probabilities of success and failure, of responses from others, planning, contingencies and so on. This sort of multi-dimensional triangulation places you as a distinct entity of a certain stature in a world, and creates a highly mediated sense of self, the posterior sense of self which is equated in a paradoxically Cartesian way with the founding subjectivity, the ultimate prior, the field of all fields. Out of this comes the characteristic phenomenology of that functional version of the self known as ego, its intermittences, its paranoia, its scrupulousness, its insecure megalomania. It's very strange that you can 'lose yourself', and just as unexpectedly regain it. Are the stakes real or not? This drives people crazy, they invent sins and search for a god to propitiate. How is it possible? The pathways have shifted, the feedback gone sour, but there is no one who has lost the thing that was itself.