““The conflict stirred up by new ideas can be so devastating only because so much of human life is lived in the symbolic world. What we refer to, when we use the terms 'I', 'me', or 'myself', is a human person defined not only by a body's physical boundaries but by symbolic aspects too: commitment to certain beliefs, particular ways of acting and thinking and using language, a preference for some ideas and dislike for others. As symbolic selves, each of us is a hugely complicated knot of beliefs, desires, and other neural patterns. Many strands of the tangle can also be found in many other people, but each is rendered uniquely ours by its place in our cognitive landscape, the mesh of connections which holds the knot of self together.””
