I am a proponent of the theory that our self-perception and consciousness necessarily require others to exist. (More or less, a result of map-building recursion

I am a proponent of the theory that our self-perception and consciousness necessarily require others to exist. (More or less, a result of map-building recursion: my brain constructs a map/model of you, which includes my model of your model of me, which includes my model of your model of my model… and eventually a detailed enough concept of “I” emerges.) In other words, assuming that holds, there can’t be “I” if there’s no one else. With that theory in mind, when I experience this “sliding past life” (quite an apt analogy), I actually see it as evidence of myself in some ways becoming less conscious, or at least less self-aware. It’d seem that some don’t experience such a contrast between being social and being alone; I suspect it could be because these maps their minds build have more “inertia” and are used in absence of the “territory” for longer. In a way that must be a nice feature, though on the other hand this might imply that such models aren’t as tightly coupled to reality.