At times, all the establishments of your life have to change according to one biting truth that arrives in your eye. That's exactly what the world of science had to do, thanks to the presentations of good old Al (Albert Einstein). Good old al placed his ideas before the world of science and everything else, at least most, of mechanics, from Newton to Maxwell, changed according to it. And with that came clocks that ran with different speeds at different places, possibility of time travel and civilization demolishing atomic power.

But nothing of that actually goes through the brains of little Tommy. At his raw age of eight he approaches whatever he comes across without already existing cumbersome formulations in his brain. But little Tommy is able to appreciate the fact that his school is smaller when he stands on his roof top and larger when he stands at his gate."Natural", says his dad, "the school building which is large (and not small!) looks small from a distance." But little Tommy's mind, a mind without presumptions has its own way to counter. He says, "No dad! The school building which is small looks large from close." His dad isn't left with breaks in his boy's statement to argue. He, in spite of all his drives, cannot convince that standing close to the school is the only true way to approximate its size.

Relativism. Little Tommy has absolutely no idea as to what and how significant a conclusion he has laid down. That's the same thing good old Al did. He broke apart the "natural" feeling that predominated and found a battery of significant conclusions, the essence of which is that the status of truth changes with the status of yours.

Ages back, people determined at studying their "self" found themselves consisting of emotions, feelings intelligence and such intangible aspects of existence, as opposed to the material. It came to them as a shock when they had, convincingly proved on the other hand, that they had something to do with the tissues within the skull. It just didn't go for them to call themselves physical and material, and it pricked every time they tried to deny the material basis of their existence. Presumably, based on the presumption that there can be only "one" truth, they tried to fuse or mix these conclusions into an ethereal soul, something that though not physical, could fly, stop and even shift its residence! The ethereal soul was said to be an immaterial thing that was still considered to have material properties. Happily as it could be said, it became a problem with imagination, and thus existence. It still continues to boggle the minds of many.

Science has now shown that every aspect of the feeling of self can be tied to the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. Conscious perceptions of the self can be manipulated by physical means. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can induce hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. Chemicals like caffeine to Prozac can alter how the self thinks; surgery that severs the corpus callosum spawns two identities within the same skull.

But despite all the explanation provided, an intangible form of the self always precipitates out. The individual's perception about his own self and the subjects closely associated with it like intelligence seem to be far different from things like neurons that can be pointed at. Despite this great abyss of difference between the tangible and intangible aspects of the self, it hasn't gained enough recognition. The fact that transmission through a certain neuronal circuitry in the tangible brain causes the intangible self to perceive something is taken as something very usual and obvious. The problem arises when one aims to bring this obviousness an explainable footing; the problem arises when one actually tries to relate the two events into one established reality. A scientist claims some neuronal activity to be some thought but finds no explanation to the link they possess, to the actual piece that joins the intangible thought to the tangible activity. An experimenter that aims to find "one" true definition of the self either by calling it the tangible brain or the intangible self finds no point of connection between the two and is left with two grossly different answers to the same question.

Find the link of communication between the tangible and the intangible self is like finding the point where the expression in decimals 0.999… actually turns to 1. No matter what distance you traverse you stay with two. Science has come across a similar problem while searching for the point where matter actually converts into energy. The truth is that the definition of the mind is relative, relative to the way it is seen and any single definition fails to stand all by alone. That's the way good old al talked about and little Tommy found on the way to his school.

Once the dual definition of the self is resorted to, the concept of the ethereal soul itself becomes insignificant, just like good old Al regarded the luminiferous ether as useless. Even if there exists some soul that uses the brain like a PDA, the soul, no matter what its constituency be, remains an expressible and tangible form still widely and immiscibly different from intangible concepts like "me". The dual definition of the self is the solution to the long stretched dilemma on it.

The interplay between the tangible and intangible definitions of self opens up a vast scope for newer conclusions. The way physical manipulations can change consciousness, scientists have found that even the adult brain, earlier thought to be hardwired, can change according to the thoughts it carries, thus implying that "the mind can change the brain".