The mind, however, is not an easy thing to express.

When we look inside our self, what we find is a consciousness that never stands still. Our thoughts flow in a turbulent current, and every moment usher in a new wave of sensation. Though our being is generally treated like a static thing, but actually the mind is neither solid nor certain. Instead, it is very erratic, very undependablenow to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. At any given moment, it seems to be scattered in a million little pieces. Mind is made of fragments. Something always keeps us from disintegrating, at least most of the time. If we press to our center, we see there is something there and whatever holds us together is the self, the essential thing. Although the brain is just a loom of electric neurons and contradictory impulses, the self makes us whole. It is the fragile source of our identity, the author of our consciousness. If the self didnt exist, then we wouldnt exist. But how flimsy the self is! Our existence is like a butterflys wing clamped together with bolts of iron. The self at the center of our personal universe is actually just a story, a constructed narrative. Our brains think in stories. Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the I and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the me which again is a coherent account of who we think we are based on past experiences, current events and aspirations for the future. The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed. Patients who are paralyzed often deny that they have a problem. The same is true of normal people. We can easily spot the inconsistencies in other peoples accounts of their self but we are less able to spot our own, and when those inconsistencies are made apparent by the consequences of our actions, we make the excuse, I wasnt myself last night or It was the wine talking! Well, wine doesnt talk and if I were not myself, then who were I and who was being me? The fragmented nature of the self is very much a theme of modernist literature. We are splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, perfect, solid, consistent wholes. So far, we have found that the brain is clearly a complex of interacting systems all the way up from the senses to the conceptual machinery of the mind the output of the brain. We are nothing more than an extremely complicated processing system that has evolved to create rich re-presentations of the world around us. We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. The richness of experience must be made up of a multitude of hidden processes and that the core self must be an illusion for the reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. The same can be said for the self. Whether it is the I of consciousness or the me of personal identity, both are summaries of the complex information that feeds into our consciousness. The self is an efficient way of having experience and interacting with the world. However, when I think about it, my decision covers a vast multitude of hidden processes, past experiences and cultural influences that would take too long to consider individually. Each one of them feed into my decision.

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It is impossible to interrogate your own mind independently. In other words, the narrator and the audience are one and the same. But when it comes to the mind I cannot be both the hunter and the hunted. So may be the brain creates both the mind and the experience of mind. So I can become aware of a thought, but I am not independent to that thought. Now that is a very unsatisfactory answer for most people because it simply does not accord with mental experience. We entertain thoughts. We consider options. We gather our thoughts together. We play out scenarios in our mind. However, unquestionable as that mental experience might seem to all of us, there can be no one inside our head considering the options. Otherwise, I would then have the problem of an infinite regress about who is inside our head, and so on, and so on. Most of us feel our self is at the center of our existence responding to everything around us the notion of an integrated entity. But thats not true, its just an illusion. For example, most us think that we see the world continuously throughout the waking day when in fact we only see a fraction of the world in front of us, and because the brain blanks out our visual experience every time we move our eyes in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hours of the day. This is why we cannot see our own eyes moving when we look in a mirror! So conscious experience is not a guarantee of whats really true. As for the comparison with a watch clearly, it is composed of many parts and the sum of the parts is the watch. However, a watch is only a watch by convention. An alien would just consider it to be some form of complex composite object. You could even use the watch as a weapon to kill small animals. Its a bizarre use of this object no doubt, but there is nothing inherent or essential to the watch that defines what it is. And even then, a microbe living on the watch face may not consider it an object. So a watch is a watch because of a recognized function and to some extent, a convention both of which do not confer an independent reality to the mind that is considering it. It depends on how you look at it.

Reference: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/the-self-illusion-an-interview-withbruce-hood/

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