If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother. We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother. This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves! But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery , not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between ...