Re:

I sugggest the expression really should be "I think, therefore I believe I am"

I believe that I think, but am "I" the agent of thinking?

i is a mental construct that gives an evolutionary advantage, .

absolutely. so are truth and meaning

i wonder in game theory what advantage it gives.

Law of large numbers is all that is needed

From a cybernetics perspective, there is Ashby's "Good Regulator" theorem, which states that every regulator with enough degrees of freedom will form a model of what it regulates. The Self is perhaps at its core a model of our own internal attention regulation, which leads to a protocol of what we attended to, including acts of accessing that protocol itself.

I am not sure how to relate that to game theory; you may be able to get that without evolutionary competition. However, game theory is probably the way to explain how we evolve submission to norms beyond indirect reciprocity.

Most animals don't have a self model, probably because they don't have complex enough brains or long enough training phases (childhoods) to do meta-regulation.

they may have physical prosthesites like cat whiskers. to enable it to guage widthh of hole.

no, i disagree, the spaceship is only an advanced prostthetic... not interesting at all.. interesting is we have no idea what the top down for humans is. collective. group behavior, I dont see any differnce between humans and cells, just a different layer of the same.. regulatory systems. action s feedbacks and "learning", all with no goal. the goals are illusions.. that the indiv thinks they decide. like the soldier ant that is recapitualted to a garbage ant if the garbage ants are wiped out. the soldier ant thinks it made the decsion..

Exactly! Sensors like that are often one of these solution that get you 80% of the way with 20% of the effort.
Except that minds that take 15 years to train are o dramatically more expensive that almost no species can afford them (but they end up getting you to the moon, which no prosthesis can).

So you don't think that practical intelligence is the ability to build arbitrary prosthetics?

I agree that humans share an important similarity with cells, i.e. they have mechanisms that suppress individual competition when it conflicts too much with group selection. Without such mechanisms, group selection fails, because within each group, defectors have a local advantage.

The simplest mechanism to enforce cooperation is reputation, but it works only when others are looking, and manage to keep tallies. To do better than that, evolution has to breed a virtual next level regulator into the individual, which may be your missing "top down for humans". A system of norms and taboos, for instance a religion or ideology that people pick up from their environment.

Individuals can decide, but in social contexts, the utility of decisions is given by how well we understand the constraints under which we operate.