It has often seemed to me that ultimately, when I am thinking about who my closest friends are, it all comes down to how they are — how they smile, how they talk, how they laugh, how they listen, how they suffer, how they share, and so on. I think to myself that the innermost essence of each friend is made up of thousands of such ‘how’ ’s, and that that collection of ‘how’ ’s is the answer — the full answer — to ‘Who is this person?’

It may seem that this is purely a third-person, external perspective, and that it takes away, or even denies, the whole first-person perspective. It may seem to short-change or even to casually dismiss the ‘I’. I don’t think so, however, for I think that even to itself, that is all an ‘I’ is. The rub is, an ‘I’ is very good at convincing itself that it is a lot more than that — in fact, that is the entire business that the word ‘I’ is in! ‘I’ has a vested interest in continuing this scam (even if it is its own victim)!

Douglas Hofstadter, in I Am A Strange Loop