What
is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense
of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical
problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science.
It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property
of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of
interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically
involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning
inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that
gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.
clipped from: www.edge.org