What am I? In many religious traditions, the answer would be given in terms of the "soul" -- something that is fundamentally "me". Believers in this tradition imagine something inhabiting the body but separable from he body, especially at death. After death, the soul goes on to further adventures in Heaven, Hell, the Happy Hunting Ground or perhaps another body, human or not. In any case, the soul seems to inhabit an entirely different universe, immune from the laws of physics or, dare we say it, logic. Outside of religious thinking, we generally use the term " mind " in place of "soul", but the common image is still something inhabiting the body, different from the body and somehow "looking out" on the real world. This way of thinking saddles us with the "mind-body" problem, in which we attempt deal with one of life's central mysteries: How is it that I can look out from "inside" my mind on to a material world? ...

We are all "bubble heads". We see the world indirectly in terms of the "bubble worlds" we create in our heads. Training starts early as we teach our children to "suspend disbelief. 99% of all children's stories take place in bubble worlds full of people with animal heads living in cute little universes where the scary, complicated rules of real life are put aside. It is wrong to see this as some kind of conspiracy. It really is training in the way our minds must work, but many people don't understand this. They think, for example, that other people's religions are "bubble universes" divorced from reality. Not theirs. Other people suspend disbelief and live in a bubble where it's quite possible to be reborn as a cockroach. In the Greek bubble universe, the gods "pulled the strings" from Mount Olympus. It's easy to see that as a fairy tale for grown ups. But the Christian bubble universe operates by suspending the laws of...