People afflicted with multiple personalities reveal that the idea of the self is a fiction.

The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brain’s organizational sophistication.

Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment in which he found that the brain activity began about half a second before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action, as though consciousness is a mere afterthought.

As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: “Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly purposeful and integrated way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision.”