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Everyone thinks that talent and creativity are the first determinants of a writer's success, but people who have actually made an attempt in writing, know that there is much more to it. The greatest struggle that writers face is their inability to manage their time and find the energy to stick to the given schedule.

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

When it comes to reading during the Superbowl, we are pros here at the Quirk HQ. Our own Blair Thornburgh dished out some handy tips last year. But what if you actually want to get into football, like all your pals at the Superbowl party you've been dragged to? The crew over at Ninja Essays whipped up this great NFL Reads Infographic, which we've embeded below. Lots of great books worth checking out!

Llewellyn's job is to sort and search these files, divining interconnections between them and leading the mouse pointer to the likeliest prospects. It is an inexact science, to say the least-but, with history to corroborate recollections of notable avatars, it is actually less so than, say, psychology, in which my past-life regression therapist holds a distinguished Ph.d.