What Am I?

I was driving to Newport Beach the other day... I found myself both on the way there and the way back in intense thought. I wasn't focusing on driving, at one point I even texted my cousin - "Thanks for steering subconscious." Anyway, back to the good stuff, I've read somewhere that the mind does the best thinking during mundane tasks... such as driving. I kept thinking, what am I? Are we just brains? What is this consciousness and why can I think that I am just a brain? To think that, you have to have such a strong sense of self - ironically.

Aristotle said - All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Well, is that it? Are we just big gears, chemical and electrical processes? Do we just follow these laws of physics? Or is there something more? Is there something else? Perhaps a unified consciousness or a field that connects everything in life; I can assure you that we do not know everything about ourselves, this world, or this universe.

When I look at some of the processes our brain computes daily, such as vision - here I see a tree, it is green. In a nut shell, my brain takes in the light rays that are given off in the electromagnetic spectrum, some cones in my brain are "tuned" to this medium lightwave that green gives off, and all of a sudden the color "green" is recognized and sensed! Now it is one thing for my brain to have these cones that are sensitive to light waves in the first place, it's another thing for these light waves to register as the color green, and it is another all together that something is doing the recognizing! Is it a gear driven process, that one thing leads to another and brings up this knowing of seeing the color green? Or am I the driver of my brain, if you will, someone the manifestation of all the processes at once, another level of awareness. Our brains are mostly working on the subconscious level, we don't consciously process colors, sounds, motor movements... well almost anything. This is more supportive of the Darwinian evolution theory. That all we are has been derived over time, evolving to support survival. But what is this consciousness? Neuroscience today is looking at this crucial and interesting question to understanding ourselves. In the words of Ramachandran, we are aiming to find the double helix of our brain, what makes some things conscious, where others are unconscious. One interesting case that shows the clear discrimination between conscious and subconscious is in the visual system once again, with the case of "blindsight". What happens here is one of the routes to vision is damaged, typically the V1 or visual cortex itself is damaged. This is essential to note, because it isn't the eye itself that is damaged, but a conductor to one of the visual routes. Now I say one of the visual routes, because there is another route that bypasses the visual cortex and uses other brain structures. So here I have this blindsight patient, patient X, he is unable to "see", in that if you ask him what is in front of him - he will report seeing nothing at all. However, if you were to stream dots across a screen in front of him in a specific direction, such as to the right, and then ask him to guess which direction the dots are moving, patient X will 'guess' correctly every time! Without ever actually being able to "see" the direction of the dots! This is made possible by one of the intact visual routes, and ironically, it is an older route that is utilized by most reptiles. It revolves around the processes of motion. For example, a frog can't see still things, if a fly was to perch directly in front of it, the frog would not notice the fly. Yet once the fly left that spot and moved, the frogs visual system would go haywire and the frogs stomach would have some digesting to do! Basically, this poses two things, one - that we have subconscious structures assisting us with everyday tasks, and two - since in this specific example, that subconscious structure is apparent in older species, are we merely just the evolution of it? Leaving me to pose to you the grandiose question of it all... Are we just brains?