Can you have a mind that can completely understand itself?

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I am not have this level of mind.

I believe some physicists and cosmologists view the universe as a mind that is evolving towards a state where it will understand itself completely. I do not have the background to comment on the science behind this.

Paul Davies said "the universe is a mind: a self-observing as well as self-organizing system."

This idea seems to overlap with forms of the Anthropic Principle.

John Barrow and Frank Tipler's book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, ends with the following sentences:
"At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end."

The science writer Martin Gardner called this the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (C.R.A.P.)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_ ... _Principle

It really depends on the programming language. A C# version I wrote just now to try it out was 21 lines. This is lines of text, with normal formatting, not statements. My original C version was 98 lines, but Google returns a C quine that's only 3 lines!

What the OP is asking is a philosophical question.

To answer it, I'll throw in this metaphor: you can understand a car's engine completely, but still have absolutely no idea about all the places it's ever been or will ever go. Let alone all of the places it *could* go.

As to whether I think we can ever understand how the mind works, precisely, like how an engine works, my guess is no. Consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science, and the more we look into it, the more it seems as if only part of it exists in an observable state.

We would need to understand the universe first, in order to understand our own minds.