That doesn't really work. What is "yourself" in that statement, other than a conscious entity?
How would you write a computer program that "tells that story to itself," such that it actually has an experience of the world, as opposed to just being a machine executing a program without any conscious awareness?
Edit: also, whether we're in charge of our thoughts is a separate question from whether we possess consciousness. Even if we're not in charge of our thoughts, we still have a conscious experience of them.
I've never heard a complete and convincing explanation for what "yourself" could be, but meditating on the extreme unintuitiveness of self-reference and recursion (a la Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop) increases my expectation that a computational explanation is coming, eventually.
I think that's pretty wishful thinking. It's not like we don't have a lot of experience with self-reference and recursion in computational systems. In fact this site is named after that. I don't think the Y combinator is conscious.
How would you write a computer program that "tells that story to itself," such that it actually has an experience of the world, as opposed to just being a machine executing a program without any conscious awareness?
Edit: also, whether we're in charge of our thoughts is a separate question from whether we possess consciousness. Even if we're not in charge of our thoughts, we still have a conscious experience of them.