Let's talk for a moment about the Self. How do you get a Self? Well, if this is that consciousness arises out of this re-entry and reaction of the posterior and the anterior parts of the brain, the perceptual ones with the memory ones. The first thing you have, even in the fetal state, is nerve signals that discriminate you from the outside. For example, if a fetus moves, which they do a lot – remember the mothers who say feel it thumping – the proprioceptive system is already sending your brain different signals than the kind that you get when your mother pushes on her belly, right, so there's already that distinction of the inner and the outer. And as it develops after birth, certainly, in an explosion of activity, these fundamental parts of your body – remember how your body affects the brain – antecedent, they are well before anything else. And they're with us all the time, even though they're not as, how shall I say, as strong and evident as say a visual thing. You're aware of your body; you're getting proprioceptive, kinesthetic, and all that stuff, and that is a kind of contextual foundations of self. Now the problem is this: once you get language you've elaborated self in a completely different way – for example it's hard for me to believe that a mother pushes on her baby that the baby be insulted, but later on with higher order consciousness, if somebody calls you a fool you are insulted.

[Q] So with language you get ego?

So Mr Freud said. Or the other way around; I'm not sure what he said. But... but in effect, yes. The issue is... and that's a very interesting issue because it brings me to the next statement which is by way of conjecture. If you have a solid notion of consciousness and how it arises, and I have no doubt that that will happen, what, what is the impact? What does it really mean, all right? Now, if I have Einstein in Berne doing E = mc², which wasn't in the original paper but which is essential in the special theory... well, you know what happened, nuclear energy and atomic bombs and things of that kind; a deep... a deep change also by the time he had the general theory in all of physics. But what can we say about what a consciousness does, what a knowledge of consciousness would do? Well, that's interesting, because as we said before, ego... people work I think by what philosophers call propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires and intentions. Is it likely, if I know all of how my brain is conscious, that I'm going to stop working by beliefs, desires and intentions, when everybody who's speaking to me is working the same way? Well, I don't think that'll work. It won't change our basic nature, will it? But it will change how we approach psychiatry and psychology. It will change how we do teaching maybe and, above all, it's going to change the whole view of what things are like if we ever make a conscious artifact.