Thanks. I hope it was more optimistic. It's true that full accuracy may be a lost cause, but is it really what you want? What you want is effectiveness, beliefs that are useful, and that is what causal thoughts are good at, even with respect to self-reflection. This post hasn't actually delved into introspection, and there are two aspects that were left out for brevity:

1. Thoughts as self-generated stimuli: you can generate your own sensory content and include that in your subsequent thoughts recursively.

2. There isn't just one mind but two, each with its own motives working in parallel, and each is, for the other, an external entity. This is the only way to explain that you can see your own motives; that is, if there are two parts observing each other.

The second point is so controversial that I haven't written about it yet until I can find a good way to make the argument. All in all, I wouldn't give up hope of greater self-understanding yet.