The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

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.

A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

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.