The self is no ordinary piece of information, however. In fact, it contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the memories, actions, desires, pleasures, and pains are included in it. And more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. The self of the pol

MANAS IS THE BASIS for determining whether the other six manifesting consciousnesses—the sense consciousnesses of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind—are wholesome or unwholesome.

While machines can replicate many of the functional properties of cognition—prediction, pattern-recognition, solving mathematical theorems—these processes are not accompanied by any first-person experience.

Consciousness was not some substance in the brain but rather emerged from the complex relationships between the subject and the world. It was part alchemy, part illusion, a collaborative effort that obliterated our standard delineations between self and other. As Brooks put it, “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer.” —