Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.
Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.
I don't think so. The concept of self is distinct from an image (or other representation). If I run pylint against the pylint source code, it has a representation of itself. It's not aware that those lines of code are in any way special to it. I don't think it mystically becomes self-aware because of that situation.
In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.
I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.