The Self

To start a discussion on self I am quoting from Dr V S Ramachandran, from his BBC Lectures. He says the sense of slf has 4 elements -

Emodiment or ownership - we experience our self as embodied in our body.
Continuity We experience ourselves as having continuity is time - past present and future.
Unity - Though undegoing diverse sensory and other experiences and doing many things, we experience a sense of unity. The 'me' doing all this is experienced as the same.
Agency - We experience ourselves as masters of our own actions, experiences and our destiny.

Please read on ......
V S Ramachandran.....
"But what about the self? The last remaining great mystery in science,it's something that everybody's interested in - and especially ifyou're from India, like me. Now obviously self and qualia are twosides of the same coin. You can't have free-floating sensations or qualia with no-one to experience it and you can't have a self completely devoid of sensory experiences, memories or emotions.
What exactly do people mean when they speak of the self? Its defining characteristics are fourfold. First of all, continuity. You've a sense of time, a sense of past, a sense of future. There seems to be a thread running through your personality, through your mind. Second,closely related is the idea of unity or coherence of self. In spite ofthe diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts,you experience yourself as one person, as a unity.
So there's continuity, there's unity. And then there's the sense of embodiment or ownership - yourself as anchored to your body. And fourth is a sense of agency, what we call free will, your sense of being in charge of your own destiny. I moved my finger. Now as we've seen in my lectures so far, these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self really isn't one thing, but many. Just like love or happiness, we have one word but it's actually lumping together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (you're conscious and awake) you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling watchingyour own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self is abandoned. One of the axiomatic foundations ofyour Self is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of each of those aspects of self I was talking about. They can be selectively affected in brain disease".