The conscious self is the center of consciousness and agency, says Lund (philosophy, Bemidji State U.), has a primitive matter-of-fact unity, and maintains a strict identity through time. Diverging from pure-ego, psychological construction, and no-entity theories, he contends that people have experiential self-awareness that is a direct knowledge of a subject of conscious states and of its persistence through at least brief periods of time. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)