> I've just finished reading an excellent novel that bears wonderfully on the
> recent conversation between Erwin and me as regards my description of the
> self as "narrative".  "The Echo Maker" won the 2006 National Book Award in
> Fiction.  Richard Powers is an accomplished author who is well-versed in the
> sciences and the arts and his insights into the neurology of consciousness
> shine through in this tale of a young man who, after a brain-damaging car
> accident, insists that his sister, his only near kin, has been replaced by
> an impostor, an extraordinarily rare condition called "Capgras Syndrome"
> which attracts the interest of a famous author/neurologist.  This problem of
> the origin and nature of the "self"  is examined in the changing
> relationships between all the characters challenging all their ideas about
> who they the really are, both to themselves and to each other.
>
> An excerpt:
>
> "'The self presents itself as whole, willful, embodied, continuous, and
> aware.'  Or so Weber wrote once, in 'The Three Pound Infinity'.  But even
> back then, before he knew anything, he knew how each of these prerequisites
> could fail. ...