The self = what a conscious object (such as the brain) is conscious of. It is what “an object that translates and experiences that same object”, translates and experiences, from the subjective experience of that object. It is both subjective AND objective, as those two are one and the same.

When our brain becomes self-aware and conscious, we may identify our existence and being as this brain, where our consciousness is presumably “stored”.

We are the brain itself, which means that in turn, what we see as ourselves is how the brain sees itself as. So from an outside point of view, we are the brain itself, and from our, a.k.a the brain’s, own point of view, we are how the brain experiences itself in meta-logic rather than logic. This would then be consciousness.

So what is the driving force of our consciousness, then? 

What is it that allows us our own control over ourselves?

We, as the brain, are able to control the brain (ourselves) in the sense that we just follow along with whatever the brain does, while at the same time we are that said brain experiencing itself.

• In other words, the individual “will” of the brain is simply determined by whatever neural state the brain is in, but since our own self is the neural state itself (or how the neural state experiences and perceives itself as), this can also be described as the will of the brain being determined by us.

Who is this “we”? It is both the brain (objective self) and our consciousness / how the brain experiences itself as (subjective self, but still the brain itself, just seen from the brain’s perspective). 

The brain controls itself through itself, where “itself” is both its objective and subjective self as two definitions of our brain, the two sides of the same coin.

In that sense, it is both that our consciousness (subjective self) drives our brain (objective self) to action as much as the brain’s actions drive our consciousness, as they are one and the same—seen from two different perspectives.

Either way, the self drives its own self. (Though paradoxically, the “self” is also connected to the greater whole or what we falsely believe as “non-self”, which is explained in another document.)

——————————————————————————————————————————

Perhaps our unconsciousness is the part of the brain that does not “tend to” at times self-translate like the rest of the brain, but still influences the process of self-translation and thus affects the formation of meta-logic / consciousness. It could be that some parts of the brain sometimes self-translate and sometimes don’t, the “not translating” interval being unconsciousness, or it may have to do with spatiality rather than temporality.

Whatever the case, in this sense, as conscious beings (the parts of the brain that self-translate), we should still consider this other part of the brain as our own, as they are still parts of the system that our consciousness inhabits and identifies itself with—even if the scope of identification does not reach the unconscious parts, it still means that we identify ourselves with the whole brain, just only being aware of that within the self-translating areas of the brain.

——————————————————————————————————————————

Or perhaps our unconsciousness has less to do with the “parts of the brain” or different kinds of neural clusters as described above, but has more to do with the patterns that underlie the logical communication process of the neurons, or the natural neural tendencies in macroscopic scale of the brain which in turn acts as a device that produces general patterns in the meta-logic. In this sense, what underlies the logic of the brain’s self-translation may or may not be part of what the brain experiences when it experiences itself through self-translation, or perhaps both. Perhaps it is the boundary between our consciousness and non-consciousness, self and non-self, internal and external.

If the brain translates its own self through its complex logical protocols, it would experience its own self in terms of meta-logic. It could also experience its own being’s patterns (effects of unconsciousness on consciousness), but it could also experience what generates those patterns (the unconsciousness), as the brain indeed generates its own natural neural patterns and tendencies. However, what makes the brain “a brain” is not only just the brain itself, but the external world of the brain with the laws of physics that permeate through the brain. In both of these senses, one could say that unconsciousness both belongs to us and the external world, thus to the greater whole, in which our consciousness and self is connected to.

The classical concept of the ego in the field of psychology in my opinion could be the way in which consciousness expresses itself TO itself, though it is an extension of consciousness itself or the extended action of consciousness, which is the way the brain experiences itself.