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……. For most of us, our day-to-day existence is taken for granted and led by an actor we know well. The actor is us, the “I” that is doing the speaking when we say, “I did this,” or, “I did that,” the “me” that we see when we peer inside our minds, and the “you” that is reading this text. If you are like most people, your connection to your inner self is so intimate that it defines you – you cannot imagine yourself as someone else, and you never go away (even though sometimes you might wish you did), except perhaps when you are asleep.

Remarkably, there is reason to believe that this part of our self, this “I” or “me”, is something of an illusion. The great eighteenth century philosopher David Hume, thinking about personal identity, wrote that “for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

What Hume had stumbled on was the realization that he could not find a “watcher” – no homunculus residing in his brain summoning the next perception or idea; no self that was independent of the thoughts. He concluded that we

“are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement…the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postulates and situations…. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed”

Hume’s ideas can be difficult to accept. Are we really just a collection of different perceptions that come gliding along into our minds, and if we are, who or what decides what gets presented? Our perception of consciousness or what it means to have a mind is that there is precisely a sort of inner screen on which our life plays out, and thyat “we” are there not merely to watch it but to control what gets played on it. But we now know that Hume’s instincts were right: there is no central place where our brains collect up all our thoughts and present them to “you” to watch. If there were an inner “you”, then that you would also have to have inner you, and so on, ad infinitum. For no less a giant of European philosophy than Immanuel Kant, Hume’s ideas on the mind and metaphysics were enough, in Kant’s own words, to break “my dogmatic slumber.”

There is a proposal from modern brain-imaging studies that would have interested Hume, and forces us to take seriously the idea of our minds, as a place “where several perceptions successively make their appearance; Pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” It is that even at rest our minds are not merely blank, springing into action only when something requires their attention. Rather, our minds spontaneously engage in what has been called “stimulus-independent thought.” They naturally wander, flitting from one thought to another with fluidity and ease, and without being “asked”, as if their default setting is to be busy and occupied. Who or what is causing this, and for what end? No one really knows, but regions in the brain’s cortex that cause this activity have been identified. Stimulus-independent thought might be why our minds daydream, rather than merely going into idle when we are not using them, like the impression we might get of a cat sitting on a windowsill with its eyes slowly falling shut. Stimulus-independent thought might be why we are easily bored, do crossword puzzles and brain-teasers, play chess, read books and visit art galleries, watch films, play or listen to music, or even just drawn circles in the sand or toss stones into the air if only to see how they fall. Stimulus-independent thought might also be why we dream and could be a reason why some people suffer from insomnia.

It is as if our minds have appetites for thinking, and this might be just what we expect of a mind that rides inside a body that has a vastly greater capability for changing its world than does the body of any other mind. On the other hand, some might speculate that our stimulus-independent thought is merely a byproduct of thoughts vying for our attention. This is not the radical idea it might sound. Ideas have to compete for space in our minds, and those best at somehow making their way into our consciousness will have a much higher chance of being transmitted to some other mind. It could even be that these “selfish” ideas created consciousness itself as a way of getting us to tell others about them. What appears as a region of our brain that acts independently of our thoughts – the part of our brains responsible for stimulus-independent thought – might just be a launch platform they created ~ Pages 269 to 271