Thanks for the comment. Yes the witness consciousness that is pointed to by Advaita or some Buddhist schools is the pre-personal Awareness that I refer to. It is also pre-sensory as the simple sense of just being when all sense activities are also turned off as in silent meditation.

I prefer not to use the word 'witness' because it seems to imply duality between the witness and the witnessed. As Ramana Maharshi clarified beautifully on this point, "Talking of the ‘witness’ should not lead to the idea that there is a witness and something else apart from him that he is witnessing. The ‘witness’ really means the light that illuminates the seer, the seen and the process of seeing. Before, during and after the triads of seer, seen and seeing, the illumination exists. It alone exists always." And this is true for not just seeing but any experiencing of course.

Then to summarize the whole post, this illuminating light of Awareness is the primary unchanging Self that is non-personal and beyond the realm of programming, while the constantly changing personal self is only a product of experience and memory and therefore theoretically programmable.