It’s never possible to throw up a bunch of measurable or quantifiable elements and equate them to ‘the Self’.

The Self is necessarily always more than what we can know, just as reality is always more complex than any description of it.

The territory > The map

The self > explanation

This applies to many other concepts too, especially abstract ones  including love, honour, justice and  freedom.

But just as we can have good and useful maps, we can have good and useful explanations- they help us get by.

You can’t spend your life reading maps and think that you actually “know” the territory for what it is.

Amateur scientists do that. The real geniuses- Einstein, Feynman, etc- all of them were constantly aware of how their understanding of the universe was merely provisional, and limited by the limitations of their own perceptions.

People who say “the scientific method closes your mind rather than opens it”, ironically, have a close-minded view of the scientific method.