Consciouness as the Story the Self Tells Itself

Israel Rosenfield. The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten (1992) An attempt to account for the consciousness as a construct built of memory and body-image. Rosenfield points out that damaged brains result in damaged self-perception. His careful analysis of these limited self-images persuades him that perception and memory are fundamentally the same process. “I” is a narrative the brain constantly updates. Memory makes “I” feel like a continuous persistent entity, even as memory also tells “I” that it has changed over time.
     I think Rosenfield’s insights will be rediscovered as the current attempts to understand consciousness as a brain-process at the neural level fail. I would go a step further than Rosenfield: “I” is the interface between the brain and the rest of the world. That interface is all there is to know. Reality is the trace of the external world. “I” is the trace of the internal world. “Knowing” is consciousness.
     And that’s as far as I’ve come in my quest to understand what “I” am.
     A book worth re-reading. ***½