Glad you're still here for us to have this conversation! I've considered the same experiment and would love to see a demo of what you think this would look like in practice.

>The interesting thing about philosophy is that it perceives perception from inside.

Isn't that's also the futile thing about it, though? It can reflect on reflection, ad infinitum - while being subject to the same external forces and constraints as other, more linear human activites: e.g. to do philosophy one needs to find an academic institution, wealthy patron, or circle of like-minded folks, who would publish it for future outsiders like us to appreciate; one needs to avoid retaliation for disrupting the discourses of power; etc.

>Once philosophy becomes code, it can be combined with the signal processing code and code that models the brain. Having an idea of what to look for, it could be easier to discover self than to wait for selves that fend for themselves.

Have you considered that an organism as simple as a bacterium might possess perception and experience? It would know no restraint or reflection, only one or two overwhelmingly pure emotions depending on whether it's feeding, being fed upon, dividing, transferring genes, etc. As evolution layers more complex behaviors on top of this "primordial spark of consciousness", the internal experience of the organism would become more complex until we get to the present state of affairs.

Of course current science doesn't agree with the idea of consciousness without nervous system - although it doesn't convincingly explain their relation, either. (Favorite crack: how exactly have we been able to confirm that the brain is not just a big antenna, for some transmission we haven't been able to observe yet - and conscious experience doesn't originate somewhere entirely outside the physical, on a client-server basis?)

But I think the connectome of something like a nematode or fruit fly has been mapped. So maybe one could start looking for that "proto-self" in a recording of the activity of such a simulated connectome over time?

Also, I've read a couple of sci-fi writers who try to address the technical details of simulated consciousness for nerd cred; they just hand-wave away the discrete nature of the simulation, positing continuity of consciousness even when running at <1 FPS. If one could somehow identify "consciousness" in a simulated nervous system, it would be possible to verify that experimentally.

How would we be able to identify a particular feedback loop between organism and environment as "consciousness" or "self-experience" though?

>I would use philosophical texts as design documents and turn them into code.

The main obstacle I see is that philosophical texts are linguistic in nature: if you can find a base text that is "dry" enough (I've seen works of analytic philosophy already structured as paragraphs of bullet points so that could be a start; but then you might as well start with the penal code of a small country, legal thought is also a form of philosophy, and it's one of the few practical applications of theories of selfhood that we see today), you could write a program that applies the conditionals described in the source text - but how would acting according to those conditionals work? Especially if the program has no intrinsic goals of its own, like self-preservation?

For me, philosophical texts are more like the fossilized byproducts of someone's consciousness, rather than blueprints for it. I'm interested in things that could disprove that view.