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But as much as we are seemingly liberated, or "enhanced" by metacognition we are also limited by it:

One of my favorite stories as a child came out of a short story anthology called "Anima", it's called "Happy Goldfish" and it goes like this:

One day a wise Chinese sage and his disciple were walking by a pond in a garden when the wise sage sat down to rest beside the pond. There were goldfish that lived in this pond and when the Chinese sage saw them swimming in the jade colored waters at his feet he smiled and said "They are happy." His disciple turned to his master and said "You are not a goldfish, so how do you know that they are happy?" To which the wise Chinese sage replied, "You are not I. So how do you know that I do not know that they are happy?"

Also, out of the same anthology, although in no way exclusive to it, came the story of the Chinese Philosopher who dreamed he was butterfly only to wake up and then ponder whether or not he was actually a philosopher who had dreamed that he was a butterfly or a butterfly that was now dreaming it was a philosopher.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that our sense of metacognition, the range of our I-Box, is inherently constrained to the extent of itself, and, although we can extrapolate, and infer the experiences, realities, and perceptions of other people, other organisms really, we can never fully comprehend their experience of life, their sense of awareness, we can only superimposed our own perceptions and experiences over them (thus we anthropomorphize, personify, etc.), and either subtract or add on to that state of perceptions, etc. based on our sense of how “qualified” a particular organism is in a particular scenario. However, although we can observe that there are physiological and biological differences in the nervous systems of different organisms and infer that that must mean something, exactly what that meaning is, or the extent to which that meaning carries, is something that can never by concretely proven by the very fact that an individual can never truly understand the awareness, or perception of another, maybe even themselves. For, as was mentioned elsewhere in the forum as the "theory of mind", there is a you that exists in your own "mind", your own sense of "I-function", and there is also a "you" that exists in the minds, perceptions, the part of the brain that builds a representation of you, etc. of others, and each one is a little different, a little unique unto itself, and it is a you that, ironically, you may never know or understand or even be aware of.