Sublime

In their sense of ‘I’. And what is that self? What form does it take? One way of thinking of it, as offered by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, is as a looping pattern of abstractions. Our personality may be the most real thing in the world to each of us, but it is a fiction, a configuration, a way of thinking. It isn’t found in the meat

To give some additional orientation, it may help to briefly mention some people whose work I’ve drawn upon. Psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann is known for his research on mental boundaries. I found many commonalities between his concept of thin boundaries and the Greek trickster Hermes, whose personality has been admirably described by Jean Bolen, a psy

Stephen Jay Gould,

Philosophers have long disagreed about whether it’s acceptable to harm one person in order to help or save several people. Utilitarianism is the philosophical school that says you should always aim to bring about the greatest total good, even if a few people get hurt along the way, so if there’s really no other way to save those five lives, go ahea

When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story.

Judgments of responsibility depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect.

To illustrate the difference between these two ‘selves’ (of course they are two levels of processing rather than actual entities), Kahneman and his colleagues carried out a telling experiment, which he describes in his popular masterwork of cognitive exploration, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Participants were asked to hold

simple dissociative trick

The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.