The texts range from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the twentieth century where the nature of the self became a viable topic for scientific study.

A few views that run counter to this notion, such as John Searle's widely known presentation of the Chinese room argument, are included in this book mainly as targets for refutation.

Part II, entitled "Soul Searching", takes on the idea of soul—that spark which separates thinking beings from unthinking machines.

Hofstadter interprets them in accordance with his own atheistic beliefs, without acknowledgment of Miedaner's opposite intent, which used them to support alternative ideas about the nature of mind and soul.

The formation of mind from elements individually incapable of thought is the central theme of Part III, "From Hardware to Software".

For example, Dennett has tried to help the MIT Cog project develop formal computer programming methods towards the goal of producing human-like intelligence.

In his book "Contemporary Philosophy of Mind", Georges Rey provides an example of continuing attempts to express human intelligence in machines through computational processes over formally defined elements.

Thomas Nagel, Raymond Smullyan, Douglas Hofstadter, and Robert Nozick tackle the problem of translating the experiences of one being into terms another can understand.

Historian of psychology Jeremy Burman, while calling The Mind's I "a wonderful book", described it as popularizing a non-metaphorical reading of Richard Dawkins' proposals regarding memes, leading to widespread misunderstanding (in the form of memetics) and the reification of the original idea-as-replicator metaphor.