“Where do I start? Where do I begin?”
Where do I begin?
Chemical Brothers
What Do We Mean by “Self”?
We are caught in a contradiction. On the one hand, even a cursory attention to experience shows us that our experience is always changing and, furthermore, is always dependent on a particular situation. To be human, indeed to be living, is always to be in a situation, a context, a world. We have no experience of anything that is permanent and independent of those situations. Yet most of us are convinced of our identities: we have a personality, memories and recollections, and plans and anticipations, which seem to come together in a coherent point of view, a center from which we survey the world, the ground on which we stand. How could such a point of view be possible if were not rooted in a single, independent, truly existing self or ego?
Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roach. The Embodied Mind – Cognitive Science and Human Experience. 1991