ABSTRACT
The problem of the self brings to the surface some basic issues that figure throughout the cognitive science literature. The phrase "create, sustain, and influence" takes people to the limits of social psychology. The most basic issue for cognitive science is the problem of the shift from the causal world to the world of concepts, representations, or information. There are influential proposals that attempt to solve a form of this problem: the transformation of external impulses into signals. The problem would be a philosophical curiosity if pushing things back a step in more or less the same way was not a common strategy. It points to a common problem with explanations that merely restate the problem being explained in different form. The monkey could not respond without some sense of bodies in general, and the embodied character of what it was responding to.
