This article is a useful reference. Our sense of self, for me, is an emergent construction, created by a totality of our body systems. It is summation of chemical, hormonal, and nerve connections. It is both analog and digital. Every body cell is in some form of physiologic communication. The living state includes breathing, circulation and homeostasis, without which our systems cells will collapse into entropy.

As such, there is a time lag between perception, processing and accommodation into our working sense of self, the blackboard of working memory state, our mystery of consciousness. It would be too trite to call our highest levels of “registers” an illusion. It is a “working model”, with many pre-programmed, learned and also feedback controlled responses, all the way up to intensely will-focused behaviour, under direct supervision of our sense of self. Such complex working models must need to lag, to be slower, because overall integration addition and subtraction of many connected inputs over time and space, takes time. So we have “fast responses” and “slow life-time integrated thinking responses”, of reflective pondering, such as philosophers.

The concept of multiple levels of digital memory cache in modern computer systems, with read and write functions and synchronisation between levels, is a poor comparison, since only abstract arrays of bits are processed and wired. Biology is chemical, flowing, changing and cycling, and working with information flows of incredible complexity and organisation, with molecular chemical and electrical interactions at all levels. Chemistry is also electrical interactions, with quantum effects at micro timescales, beyond our perception in every interaction.

The question of social classes from masters to slaves, families, hierarchy, also blends into biology of social organism species – ants for instance, and individual vocational specialisation, because one individual cannot be the best at everything.

The problem of how to have a written working guide to our personal and social macro reality that is both coherent and useful, and non-harmful but flexible is still a good idea. Biology and behaviour is the broad field we have to understand, and the name of the game is survival, and exploration of evolutionary potential, because we have specialisation of systems. All systems are complex and unstable, every system of systems is in itself a specialisation, with so many interacting self-reproducing units of dynamic survival, and no particular system of systems is final or can be fit for all purposes.

There are obvious costs for maintaining system complexity, beyond limits of ordinary earth-system material recycling. This civilisation is obviously going to collapse, because it depletes non-renewable resources with exponential growth of demand.