The Self as Corrector: Sense of Agency and Metacognitive Presence Dissociate Under Prediction Error

The sense of agency (SoA, "I did this") and the sense of metacognitive presence (SoP, the felt engagement of self-monitoring, "I am here") are usually treated as convergent markers of an intact self. I propose instead that they are the two dissociable read-outs of a single prediction-error-driven process, and that under acute prediction error (PE) they move in opposite directions: SoA falls ("it happened by itself") while SoP rises ("I snapped into the moment"). Under low PE — automaticity and flow — the pattern reverses: agency is high but unreflected, and presence collapses toward zero. On this view, what we colloquially call "the self" tracks the monitoring read-out (the error-correction process), not the authorship read-out. This reframes the self as a corrector rather than an author, engaged intermittently by mismatch rather than continuously. The account is situated relative to attention-based (Attention Schema Theory), active-inference, and error-monitoring (ERN/Pe) frameworks. Its components are individually well-supported but rarely connected; the proposed contribution is their explicit unification as a dissociation across the full prediction-error range, together with a falsifiable prediction: at matched attentional load, increasing prediction error dissociates agency and presence in opposite directions. A concrete experimental design (a 2×2 crossing attentional load with prediction error, plus a low-cost online variant) is proposed to test it. The self is thereby characterized as the corrector rather than the author — intermittent, graded, and engaged by mismatch.