Consciousness

The poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under several aliases, each in an entirely different style, struggled with the tangled and abundant riches of his own self, by saying that each of us is "many". Needless to say, even when he was writing as one of his "heteronyms", as he called them, there was one single authorial self in charge of his original creations, the other authors being fictions. But when Pessoa said that "I do not know what instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony", his intuition was on target, as it glimpsed the astonishing complexity of a brain engaged in producing the symphonic results we call the conscious mind.