The psychological ego is essentially a bodily organ, like the liver or the kidneys; it serves to filter, or digest, reality to the smallest most useful and most consistent fraction. It evolves into its function, effecting various developmental trade-offs and taking on a fixed form. The key difference is that it dissolves, part way, every night in sleep and reconstitutes each morning on waking up. It enacts the role of consciousness without actually being consciousness, it is the servant who has usurped the role of its master because it better shares the nature of the circumstances of experience. It jealously hides its failings, its glaring incapacities, behind a veneer of omni-competence. Like other bodily organs it is destined to come apart, to decay away, at death.