It's a very thought provoking piece. I stop short of fully endorsing it because it postulates a lot of things without much appeal to real science, despite portr

It's a very thought provoking piece. I stop short of fully endorsing it because it postulates a lot of things without much appeal to real science, despite portraying itself as scientific. In particular, I'm not sure how much of the brains characteristics can truly be attributed to fractal extrapolation of (idealized) behavior of individual neurons. That complaint aside, at the consciousness level, I do think the multiple agent idea is an interesting framework for thinking about the brain. When I was in middle school, I suffered from paralyzing self-consiousness, which in retrospect was probably due to high levels of anxiety. At that age, I had come to think of my non-stop inner dialog and cacophony of voiceless mental urges as being like an internal parliament. In my later teenage years, number of stressful shocks to my system caused me to enter a period of depression, but I think it also gave me an opportunity to disrupt the mental patterns I had developed. Emergence from that depression, and I think also the inhibition lowering effects of alcohol, gave me a chance to reorganize my mental pattern in a way that gave my "self" more agency, and less to my various urges. Well, aside from my urge to use alcohol, which I would have to come to grips with years later. I would later have another depressive episode, followed by another period of plasticity where I think I was able to really alter my mindset and habits. These depressions I experienced felt in many ways like an agent that hijacked many of my mental processes that normally felt under control of my conscious self, like my feeling of motivation, my emotions, and my thought patterns, rendering my conscious self frustratingly powerless. Putting my scientist hat back on, it's tough to tell how much my personal experience and the tidy explanation of some psychological disorders and phenomena indicate a reality of a hierarchy of more or less discrete agencies.