48 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind others but with a few original twists. From a CogPrime perspective, its use has been to guide the design process, to provide a grounding for what otherwise would have been fairly arbitrary choices. 3.4.4.1 Self Another high-level intelligent system pattern mentioned above is the “self”, which we here will tie in with analysis and synthesis processes. The term “self” as used here refers to the “phenomenal self” [Met04] or “selfmodel”. That is, the self is the model that a system builds internally, reflecting the patterns observed in the (external and internal) world that directly pertain to the system itself. As is well known in everyday human life, selfmodels need not be completely accurate to be useful; and in the presence of certain psychological factors, a more accurate self-model may not necessarily be advantageous. But a self-model that is too badly inaccurate will lead to a badly-functioning system that is unable to effectively act toward the achievement of its own goals. The value of a self-model for any intelligent system carrying out embodied agentive cognition is obvious. And beyond this, another primary use of the self is as a foundation for metaphors and analogies in various domains. Patterns recognized pertaining to the self are analogically extended to other entities. In some cases this leads to conceptual pathologies, such as the an- thropomorphization of trees, rocks and other such objects that one sees in some precivilized cultures. But in other cases this kind of analogy leads to robust sorts of reasoning - for instance, in reading Lakoff and Nunez’s [LN00] intriguing explorations of the cognitive foundations of mathematics, it is pretty easy to see that most of the metaphors on which they hypothesize mathematics to be based, are grounded in the mind’s conceptualization of itself as a spatiotem- porally embedded entity, which in turn is predicated on the mind’s having a conceptualization of itself (a self) in