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I am sort of playing devil's advocate here in the sense that I absolutely do not believe what I'm saying accounts for the whole mind and I don't think we will ever be able to pinpoint or understand all of the contributors to the "I." That said, I do think that our personalities, our individual responses to similar situations, our emotional activity, are all highly dictated by autobiographical memory and its neural framework. Memories shape our behaviors, responses and ways of interacting with/understanding the world around us.

The sum of our experiences predict the unique response we have to situations, similar to the idea that sums of observations allow us to hypothesize about the behavior of scientific processes. Past knowledge, both procedural and explicit, and our memories--housed in the hippocampus--are constantly being activated in response to our daily activity and all our inputs (I guess we could say the hippocampus is a box that contains lots of interneurons which continuously filter inputs and outputs).