What is this I, this Self? What is it that tells me I have a mind, a body, and, perhaps a soul–and that other things exist?
It forms thought from the sense data revealed to it. Should it be deemed inadequate for presenting some larger sense of reality?
Persons with schizophrenia or multiple personalities lose their singular self-identity. Poets and musicians find awareness of self to be a hindrance to the selflessness of their inspirations and performances.
Is the I (EYE) an evolved, left-brain indicator of one’s bearings amid an input of myriad sense data?
What we call ‘self’ is not a singular thing, yet we’ve reduced it to a singularity.
Self is an amalgamation of processes - a continuum - linking the past, with its presence.
Past manifesting presence, and perceived as appearances, as the apparent.
Body is a representation of our past.
Perhaps we ought to separate the concept into body/mind context:
Body = sum of past manifesting presence = will
Mind = sum of stored experiences of presence - interpreting them as appearance + will full engagement/interaction with immediate presence - awareness of oneself and the world, via sensory data.
If we use ‘ego’ to represent the part we associate with ‘I’, or that which is experiencing itself and existence, then self is mostly unknown, or subconscious.
Therefore, Know Thyself, is an urging to become aware of that which remains unaware.
Conscious ego experiences itself as sensation, impulse, need, desire, intuition, feeling…
The brain is where all this sensory data is transmitted and processed, from both external and internal sources.
The first perception of oneself as 'that which I am not", relative to another.
I am…not that. Negation.
An organism must reject, otherness to preserve itself.
In short:
Physical memories, inherited genetically as DNA, synthesized with compounding experiential memories, stored in the brain as neural clusters, interacting with an objective world, is what we experience and identify as Self.
A continuum.
Then you would agree that this evolving assortment of hereditary genes and memes makes the present self as an I?
If self is a process, how does one account for this missing identifier in certain mental illnesses and in reference to the creative arts where immediate self- knowledge is an impediment?
I just finished rereading Julian Jaynes’ " The Origen of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" in which he contends that primitives throughout history had no concept of Self.
Emerging self-consciousness is confusing - as Jaynes said - and detrimental.
Self-awareness, and objectivity, exposes the mind to a new source of suffering: to perceive self as it compares to another - relative to another, in the third-person.
Will-less, as Schopenhauer described objectivity and genius.
The ‘ego’ is, often, unable to endure it, so it must defend, protect itself.
In nature the objective is not truth or awareness, but survival, and fi self-deciet help the organism survive then that is what it practices.
Objective awareness of oneself and other is often unbearable.
It takes a specific constitution and psychology…and so true philosophers are rare.
Mind that can place awareness, clarity, truth, above survival.
In my view the nihilistic defensive dogmas evolved to protect the ego from man’s emerging self-awarness.
A semiotic buttress, and wall, within which the ego can fabricate its own version of reality.
If you understand this then you immediately realize that this necessitates support, because a detached mind cannot survive for long in a world it denies existence to.
So, nihilism is always collective…it demands collectives - intersubjective communities within a sheltering, totalitarian authority.
Abrahamic asceticism, for example, can only persist if it is encompassed by a supporting community and a web of protective institutions.
In Christianity and many nihilistic spiritual dogmas, what is practiced is other than what is believed, because they would not survive if they practiced what they preached, without a protective sheltering authority.
Their one-god is absent.
So, they have developed these rituals of self-absolution to deal with this paradox.
Marxism, could not practice what it preached…as long as there existed an alternative competitor …
Anarchists can’t survive for long if they actually practiced what they preached …because somewhere else someone else would be practicing authoritarian organizations they could not survive.
In the Myth of Eden, Adam and Eve discover that they are naked after disobedience to their bicameral authority. In other words, they became self-conscious and were thus able to comprehend good and evil. Jaynes insisted that the loss of the authority of the Gods showed an evolution of the mind. He believed that the voices of the gods was a product of the right brain heard in hallucinations. Evolving left brain logic did away with the gods and left us without an interior authority seen as Other. Now, in the 21st century, the gods no longer speak to us. We are stuck with each other for communal authority to uphold our identity. We worship idols. Yes, Self is a process, not a thing. And it varies with the variety of experiences.
No, they experienced shame.
The shame of objective comparison of self and other.
McGilchrist…
Our words are no longer used as connectors of subjective mind and objective world.
They are inverted, connecting us back to our subjectivity.
Rather, diverting us to intersubjective collectives.
They are now what is left of our “external refences”: popularity, sanctioned icons/idols, community approval …hive-mind.
All encompassed within the safety of our systems which protect us from our continuing detachments.
Language, semiotics, is rooted in the nervous system - brain being its hub: mind/body synthesis.
It is now used to disconnect mind form body.
Abrahamism is nihilistic in that it worships mind and demonized the body.
The body is what the Jews refer to as the kellipot, imprisoning the ‘divine sparks’ of divine mind.
Mind is what Christians and Muslims refer to as ‘god/Allah’.
The Jesus narrative is a tale of how the ‘individual’s mind’ can be saved from its body.
Immortality refers to the mind existing in language, long after the body dies.
God is cosmic mind…universal mind/consciousness.
Satan is of the body - it is the body. the tempter.
The body is a representation of the tangible, of natural order…of all that restricts the mind.
In Americanism the physical, the body is a reminder of what it wants to liberate itself from: the past.
Body is past manifesting as presence.
The past is what they want to erase…and create a future man who has presence and only a future - is entirely void at birth - tabula rasa.
All this is self-deceptive.
They worship nothingness.
Their paradise/utopia "Tikkun Olam, refers to non-existence.
archive.org/details/the-master- … 5/mode/2up
The right/left hemisphere dilemma. How to reconnect?
I suggest it is a question of maintaining the correct balance. Difficult, when much of one or other hemisphere lays dormant.
I see it demonstrated every Saturday evening, on Match of the Day.
A footballer – a multi-talented – finely tuned athlete. A one hundred million pound investment.
An opportunity to score a goal presents itself. The player shoots, but the shot lacks power.
The Commentator: “Great chance there for Harry Kane. Unfortunately it was on his weaker left foot.”
It’s a boy, Mrs Kane. Unfortunately, he has one foot weaker than the other.
It would appear, tragically, all footballers - those we look upon as well-trained - finely tuned athletes, are born with one foot weaker than the other. Heartbreaking for the parents! 
I still believe that Adam and Eve represent the dawning of self-consciousness in the mind. What the tempter told them was that if they ate the forbidden fruit they would become as the Elohim, knowing good and evil. In any event, it was the loss of dominant right brain consciousness that lost also the voices of the gods, except in certain instances of schizophrenic hallucinations or drug induced “trips”.
How can one know the difference between what is good and what is evil without self-reference.? It would be a neat topic for research to find out if the drug trips of the 60s tapped into the right hemisphere of the brain. See John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank experiments. His mind went to some strange places.
The myth involves ‘primordial sin’ meaning we are dealing with primordial man.
Before self-consciuosness emerged.
The Adam & Eve tale is about this emergence.
Shame is the consequence of this self-consciousness.
The right/left hemisphere stuff McGilchrist gets intol is a modern man issue.
The cultivation of one side, at the expense of the other, or the intentional denial of one side, as a defence against what threatens the ego.
“stuff”
I confess, I haven’t read the book in it’s entirety.
Run the world backwards and hand a copy to Plato.
Later, having read it, he would hand over a copy of the ‘Cave Allegory’, saying: “I’ve abridged it. Good effort, but it had too much stuff in it.” 
One of the losses in the age of rugged individualism is awareness of the interconnectivity of all things. This awareness was probably a product of right brain thinking. But thought is not an appropriate word for how primitives saw themselves and their environment. Their awareness appeared to be more intuitive than reflective. Their Self was an integral part of what was Other. Thou art that. In our time Self stands in opposition to the Other, a splitting of the mind just as we have split the atom and have sliced the gene. Perhaps the hope of a right brain, left brain reunion lies in modern science as it discovers the universe as mind stuff.
Will scientific reductionism reunite use of both brain hemispheres? At the bottom of matter is mind? Are we creating the universe as we see it? What happens then to the self as I? The ego. of course is an evolved gene and meme construction. The Self, on the other hand, is a fixed point for bearings that relates to all other things.
Reduction to the lowest-common-denominator, which is energy.
Matter = patterned energies - energies vibrating/oscillating slower than the perceivers metabolic rhythms.
Energy (conventional) = energies vibrating/oscillating faster than the perceivers metabolic rhythms.
Darkness on either side falling out of a organism’s perceptual event-horizons…or lacking pattern.
And so, complexity has been confused for chaos, properly defined as that which lacks order.
Yes, we Interpret existence and call this interpretation ‘world’.
But the interpretation has consequences.
A bad interpretation leads to death.
So, the a priori interoperations of space/time and matter, have proven to be sufficiently accurate - useful.
The self is what merges within existence - as an antithesis.
At its source organism is nihilistic…and so nihilism is very attractive to it.
The ego is the part of self that has become lucid.
No, self is dynamic and interactive…held together by memory.
A causal chain of intentionality, in a sea of unintentional interactivity.
Will is what differentiates it - intent.
Thanks for the clarifications,