When you say, "I believe..." what do you mean by "I"?

We know intellectually that our eyes are not little windows in our heads through which we simply observe a quite detailed 3-D image of what is going on around us. We know there is a lens, and a retina, and optic nerve. We know that the nrain has nearly as many nerve pathways running to the eye as neural paths back from the eye. In the case of our ears, there are actually more control paths outbound to the ear than data paths back from it. So clearly, lots of preprocessing of sensory input is done right at the sensory organs, and far more is done when that ensory input reaches the brain.

But the distinct impression “I” get inside my head is that I am not my brain, or my eyes, or those neural paths. I am a detached observer siting there watching the viewscreen in a movie theater with color, detail and sound that even a $500 million dollar Holywood production can come nowhere close to matching.

So who or what do you think that “I” is—that thing that has the incredible property of awareness of being aware. Am “I” an immortal soul, an emergent self arising from the processing power of the 100 trillion neural connections in my brain, or nothing more than a collection of brain cells carrying out actions solely determined by chemical and quantum electromagnetic reactions?