As I imply elsewhere , the bricks in the wall that build up our personhood are experienced as states of consciousness. Consciousness is the discrepancy between the contents of a semi-liberated mind and the world that’s wholly enslaved to undead natural dynamics. When we reflect on our thoughts, feelings, or sensations from the higher-order perspective, thus experiencingto undergo those mental contents instead of just passing through them in the less reflective, animal fashion, we separate from the world, retreating to an aesthetic vantage point so that we can act as creators of our life. This perspective is somewhat like the alpha-fixed point of a Mandelbrot set of fractals , the point at which similar bulbs of the pattern sprout like flower petals. Perhaps stretching the analogy too far, the idea is that one bulb is the world of experiential inputs to which a person responds with a second bulb of actions that don’t just maintain the given world but distort it according to a vision of certain ideals which prescribe how the given world should be altered. The fixed point between the natural and the artificial is what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the view from nowhere, the cognitive space of objectivity which I argue overlaps with the aesthetic attitude , a sort of mental island that’s broken from the mainland by the power to think for itself. We don’t always occupy that space, since we often perform our daily routines on autopilot, behaving more like animals than fully-awakened people. But we typically face our existential potential for freedom when we’re forced to decide how to handle some crisis. Then we say we have to “dig deep” and meditate, calling up our unconscious convictions to put our personal stamp on our response. Just as we export our genetic code in sexual reproduction, so too we impress our personality into the pattern of our activities. Even the humdrum habits we tend to form are decided largely by formative decisions we make as children or teens when we first confront the world that we learn is fundamentally opposed to us by its indifference.