The Two-Axis Model of Self-Awareness: Sense of Agency and Metacognitive Presence Diverge in Antiphase Under Prediction Error

The sense of agency (SoA) and the sense of metacognitive presence (SoP) — the felt engagement of the self-monitoring system — are typically treated as convergent markers of intact conscious experience: both high in normal function, both degraded in dissociative states. Here I propose that they are, in fact, two dissociable axes of a single predictive mechanism that diverge in antiphase under acute prediction error (PE). Specifically: as PE rises, SoA falls ("it wasn't me, it happened by itself") while SoP rises ("I snapped into the moment"). Under low PE — that is, in automaticity and flow — the pattern reverses: SoA remains high and unreflected, while SoP collapses toward zero. This model reframes the folk concept of "self" as an artifact of the presence axis (the error-monitoring loop) rather than the authorship axis (the motor comparator). It further predicts that self-awareness is triggered not by attentional load, as the Attention Schema Theory (Graziano, 2013) implies, but by prediction error — a claim that directly explains the flow-state anomaly, in which attention is maximal and self-consciousness vanishes. Existing literatures on agency (comparator model) and on error monitoring (ERN/Pe) independently support each half of this claim. However, they have not been unified, and current predictive-processing accounts treat SoA and SoP as co-directional. The antiphase hypothesis is therefore both novel and falsifiable. A minimal experimental protocol is proposed.