The fact that we can induce out of body experiences with drugs that appear to exactly match lends credence to this idea.
I suspect that people are somehow predisposed to interpreting the result of failed memory formation by a brain-in-dire-straights as having looked upon themselves. It could be a quirk of how memory/congition works, or it could be cultural, even.
How could this possibly be measured empirically? I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, necessarily (I don’t know one way or another) but it stretches credulity to position such subjective experiences that lie well outside of experimental ethics a “fact”. Do you have any links to research that could push back on that intuition?
How much of that was was after the fact reconstruction and how much was actual experience? In the same way, our brain doesn't notice the visual blind spot and just assumes that whatever is there is consistent with its context, even though there is nothing it can experience there.