What Happens [in A Coma] Is That

People Who Are Great Thinkers, In Science Or In Art, People Who Are Great Performers, Have To Have That Kind Of Capacity. Without That Kind Of Capacity, It's Extremely Difficult To Manage A High Level Of Performance Because You're Going To Get A Lot Of Extraneous Material Chipping Away At The Finery Of Your Thinking Or The Finery Of Your Motor Execution.

But Whether We Want To Do It Because We Want To Have People To Have A Different Idea Of Who We Are Or Not, We Do It Naturally. So The Way We Construct Our Narrative Is Different From The Way We Constructed It A Year Ago. The Difference Is Maybe Very Small Or It May Be Huge.

A Self That Is Very Robust, That Has Many, Many Levels Of Organization, From Simple To Complex, And That Functions As A Sort Of Witness To What Is Going On In Our Organisms.

A Conscious Mind Is A Mind With A Self In It.

Some Of Us, For Better Or Worse, Develop Very Stable, Consistent, And Largely Predictable Machineries Of Self. But In Others, The Self Machinery Is More Flexible And More Open To Unexpected Turns.