You and Me

I have dreamed in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’ How we process the world around us indeed alters our identity. Our dreams need to be nurtured with the best possible materials

Neuroscience will never be able to throw light on the subjective first-hand experience of feeling what it’s like to be me, or you. Nor, as we saw when considering consciousness in general, is it obvious even what kind of scenario one could expect to address the riddle of how the water of the physical brain and body is transformed into the wine of first-hand experience. But I hope I’ve shown that neuroscience can at least go some way in helping us root this elusive concept of ‘identity’ in the reality of the physical brain and its neuronal mechanisms. By understanding those brain processes and how they might interact with, and be changed by, an unprecedented environment, we scientists may never be able to understand what it actually feels like to be you or me. But we may be able to point to the best possible environments in which that feeling can flourish.

et when dealing with the subject of human identity, I cannot completely remove myself from the equation. I have done my best to assume a scientific attitude but I cannot deny that in this matter I am both the presenter and the subject of the presentation. I am aware that in discussing identity, my own identity also comes into question.

Yet it is also one of the most slippery.

Rather, it is to have a continuing sense of that self, a consistent sense of identity as a fulfilled and unique individual that transcends the moment-to-moment shifts in a world on the move.

While our faces are only visible from a mirror, and our subjective sense of identity influenced only indirectly by how people respond to those faces, the breakdown of the body firewall isolating it from the outside world could have a more dramatic impact on the notion of privacy as defined, almost literally, by the physical body. If t

We saw in Chapter One that faces were an important adjunct, but not pivotal, to how we see ourselves; yet if we are treated differently by others as a result of how we look, then each context of consciousness – which we have seen is so important to defining identity at any one time – will obviously be impacted. How will these more uniform, smooth faces affect identity?

Decision-making as a key to the future: an early lesson a child learns, at least until gaming became so dominant, is that actions have consequences, and hence a significance

By placing a fact, event or object into a conceptual framework of other connected facts, events and objects, we can appreciate its significance: we are able to convert information into knowledge.

he more we can see one thing in terms of something else – as with the metaphor of the candle for death – the more deeply we can understand it.