Another interesting thread Phil.. experiencing oneself through a feedback loop of one's own creation and reinforcing the ontological nature of epistemology. It's interesting.. that those things one writes down in a dairy are thoughts transformed into physical manifest.. things which were ephemeral and non-physical as an idea or thought, moved through neurons in your mind organ, to twitch your nerves in your tissue pipes of your fingers to carve out images that represent those thoughts, which through light refraction, go back through the optical nerves to make sense again, and recognize, "self-realize" in a sense, that that which it is seeing on the piece of paper hence forth is in fact the same as that which allows the mind to see and better understand what it only just knew seconds ago itself, as solely in the mind?

So it makes me think.. are not all things in the physical construct, the physical matrix, all ultimately creations of thought? Things that were purely non-physical that through it's on volition somehow became manifest to experience itself? The chair, the house, the neighborhood, the city-state, the society, all physical objects, but an extension then of some other higher octave of vibrational existence that somehow figured itself to swim down the duct of the birth canal to procreate itself so it can.. self-experience itself.. to what end?

For some reason the word "blood-brain barrier" popped into my mind toward the end of your comment.

I like the questions that your posture brings up. Why would all this material evolve consciousness and observe itself? Why would it create entities like us that behave and define themselves so separately from itself?

"The blood-brain barrier".. opens up a flood gate of thoughts for me.. one thought is of the synaptic connection and dendrites that make thoughts possible, which reminded me to check where we are on the computing power singularity ascent.
I recall we're now only 2 orders of magnitude away from achieving human brain processing capabilities in computing (I believe the IBM road runner hit 1 petaflops sustained last summer).

The second thought it sparked for me was that as intricate a mechanism of nature as the blood-brain barrier is, the one interesting part of our organ that does not function behind it is the Pineal gland. Which interestingly enough floods our brains with dimenthyltriptamine at the time of both birth (when our skulls are crushed to go through the birth canal), and death (when our mind is flooded with what many experience in NDEs as "the tunnel of light"). Oh, and happens to also occur naturally when psilocybin metabolizes in our system through ingestion as psilocin, found in certain strains of naturally spawning mushrooms around the world.

You pose a very deep and possibly unanswerable (from this state of being) question: "why would -it- create entities like us that behave and define ourselves so separately from itself?". Again, this reminds me of one's definition of "itself", or "self" as in self-actualization. If I assume the "itself" or "self" is a non-physical, non-thinking, yet self-aware and self-conscious "something", out of which super strings wiggle and supernovas explode, it would seem that like the poet who self reflects with his own words on a personal journal, perhaps existential creation is the "being-ness" self reflecting and self-recognizing itself, that it itself is. Maybe creation itself, the entire universe, is a feedback loop, and through it, it can experience and grow itself, and become even more "itself" than it already is?