Medical statistics tells us that our whole cellular life cycle, from birth to death, is a multiple recycling of our cellular body, in anatomic, physical and physiological terms. All medical pathologies are related to malfunctions of the organic cellular signal system, with the most important transfer transductor of membranes. So, it is materially indeed paradoxical that a living human being (living matter system) claims to be the same organism ! Consequently, self-consciousness is about subjective ontological memory which seems to be the perceptional fundament of epistemological objectivation. Our ontological subjectivity or identity (oneness) is our human contribution to improve this world by ethical elevation. Only G-d has no need for physical change or the spiritual physics that we have to wrestle with, in order to perfect our soul as physical spirits. As it is stated by the Hebrew sages, we are spirtual beings that make human experiences to connect to the eternal upper force.

This topic deserves a more thorough treatment than I can afford in a single thread.  In fact, I am writing a book on it, and it is an active area of my research (see link).

We can gain a lot of insight about consciousness and self awareness (different concepts, but closely related) by appealing to neurology.  All the data suggests that when an area of the brain is disabled due to injury, pathology, etc. the aspect of consciousness respective to that region is lost.  For example, those who have a damaged amygdala not only do not feel fear but have no concept of fear at all.  They can't even recognize the emotion in others.

If we study the neurology of organisms which pass the Gordon Gallop test of self awareness, it seems that the neorcortical feedback of such creatures is upwards of 90%.  The neocortex is the 'intelligence' area of the brain, if you will allow me to be so general for the purposes of this thread.

All this suggests that first, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of neurological processes, and second, that feedback is necessary.  This makes sense since brain regions respond functionality to different situations (that is their job after all), but it is the feedback mechanism that makes us aware of it in that upper cognitive regions are able to assimilate, classify it, and enrich the experience by bringing in other functional areas (e.g. emotions, memory).

https://www.researchgate.net/project/The-Computational-Theory-of-Intelligence

@Stephen: Thank you for such implication on Dialogo project and your remarkable contributions! Regarding the actual Q (maybe I wasn't clear enough): when saying 'same' I didn't mean conservation, stillness, immobility (Parmenides), but identity, common factor, recessivity. Me still equals Me after a complete transformation in mind, after entering a stage of consciousness that contradicts the previous one? Religiously approaching this we can see people who forsake themselves as they were before; that is the power and the benefit of conversion = leaving the old You (conscious Self) behind and entering/embracing a new [stage of] consciousness, completely denying everything he did before as it wouldn't be himSelf.

This is the Identity I was talking about: am I still ME or not?

@Daniel: Welcome to Dialogo endeavor! I am sure you can add important help with your findings, Daniel. Therefore these Qs are only meant to arouse the interest of scholars that can make a difference by attending Dialogo's events. For May it is about the link you guessed: neurology, psychosociology, and theology; so, don't be a stranger and make us part of your research. You brought an interesting case, and it seems to me that there are so many other important ones to be revealed.

As for the "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of neurological processes," it was already said in Dialogo debates that brain is merely the hardware of the consciousness, but not even by far the C itself. It supports, serve as the physical reliance; nevertheless the software is far beyond the brain and cells.

Thanks for your kind words.  I would be happy to participate in further dialogues.

Consciousness is multi tiered and hierarchical and the layer near the reality perceived through physical senses is closer to lower layers of consciousness. 

"contradicting ourselves concerning previous acts of decisions" are invariably related to world of sensory perception bounded by causality.  This interaction is maxium with intellect, then by mind and then by self. Consciousness is having a far greater correlation with self.

@Tripathi: thanks for your intervention. you have intuited my research title in the Dialogo conference that is about to begin in May, multi-layered Consciousness. I am sure that Buddhism has lot to emphasize on this topic, but no scholar has yet submitted a paper for the conference as far as I know - and this is rather peculiar. I consider that 'causality' and 'temporality' are indeed the main features of this Q.

@Cosmin: I understood, thanks. This has a lot to do with the dynamic interplay of human free will and social conditioning, e.g. the whole stimulus-response-circuit of human behavior for economic gain in todays monetized world. We can better research into the Q of free will (choice) by understanding the human-made jackpot of living chances, e.g. access to higher knowledge and wisdom by learning from the prophets of humankind, something like a 'baptism' of enlightenment.

@Cosmin: This sure makes me look forward to your paper. Thoughts which I have expressed exists in various ways in many branches of Hindu Philosophy starting from earliest known Rigveda where seers speculated the conditions prior to beginning of creation. They professed that before matter came into existence only pure consciousness only could exist and at that time where there matter was yet to come into existence,  space associated with and incidental to matter and  time associated with and incidental to space (speaking form Relativity aspect) did not exist. Causality autonomously ceased to be a matter of concern in absence of notion of time. Consciousness was an even more central theme and crystalized in Philosophy of Advaita (non Duality), and in similar but distinct fashion in Philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism to name two principal schools of Indian Philosophical traditions. There are yet additional traditions which have a sophisticated nomenclature and taxonomy for describing as well as attaining various states of elevated consciousness.

In Modern Science Consciousness of course was ushered in through Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, where the role of an impartial and objective observer or experimenter dissolved into holistic observer-observed continuum. We know that there are Quantum realities that do challenge our normal notion of Causality and often lead to (or predict) counter-intuitive outcomes. Thus we can stipulate that quantum realms do represent and demand a different perception or consciousness if you will.

Thus coming back to "what is called as changing one's mind in sensory world" in my view has very little coupling or a very loose correlation with deep seated (Hierarchically speaking) consciousness. Another counterintuitive observation will be that while levels of consciousness remain distinct, there is a continuum there too.

Assuming computationalism, you might be the universal person that we can canonically associate to the "Turing" Universal Number/Machine. She is in an highly dissociated state of consciousness---the one which differentiate on all computations. Some meditating technic (with or without drug) makes this plausibly experienceable (which proves nothing, but make it more palatable for some people). That universal person is defined by three or more "hypostases" close to Plotinus' one, but also quite comparable to some dream states described for example in the indian Yoga-Vasistha. 

So the best way to get this consists in calming down the activity of the brain, which can be quite distracting, especially when the mundane activity is so pressing ...

Dear colleagues, thank you for your interest in having such inquiries asked with multiple answers and very interesting debates. Since most of you had no time in writing a full paper for Dialogo Conference on this topic, Self-Soul-Consciousness, I would like to propose a way of making these answers count more and make them more visible. I could ask the board of Dialogo Journal if we can make a distinct session in the Journal Proceedings of this conference with a group paper encompassing all the answers you have given here for the same Q.

Who is in and agrees with this proposal?

If so, you can use the remainings days until the conference's end, 26 May, to write a larger answer to this Q so that we can integrate it in the Proceedings.