The brain creates the experience of the self to bring together the many parliaments of the mind. Studies have shown that motor actions have been processed a full half second before they take place. This links to free will in that the exact reasons behind our actions are not known to us. The human duplication thought experiment demonstrates the mind-body dualism in which many people believe while materialists by nature must believe that to duplicate a person atom by atom would result in the exact same person with the same mind.

There is a distinction to be made between the I and the Me, the former being the sense of self experiencing the present moment (experiential self), and the latter representing the autobiographical self.