Self Comes to Mind

role.
    Building a mind capable of encompassing one’s lived past and anticipated future, along with the lives of others added to the fabric and a capacity for reflection to boot, resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel, as hinted at earlier, is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds. The coordinators are not mythical, sapient homunculi in charge of interpreting anything. And yet the coordinators do help with the assembly of an extraordinary media universe and with the placement of a protagonist in its midst.
    The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions of the brain stem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider-than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of cerebral cortex and subcortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, in ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anesthesia, brain dysfunction, or death.
    No single mechanism explains consciousness in the brain, no single device, no single region, or feature, or trick, any more than a symphony can be played by one musician or even a few. Many are needed. What each of them contributes does count. But only the ensemble produces the result we seek to explain.
VI
     
    Managing and safekeeping life efficiently are two of the recognizable achievements of consciousness: neurological patients whose consciousness is compromised are unable to manage their lives independently even when their basic life functions operate normally. And yet mechanisms for managing and maintaining life are not a novelty in biological evolution and are not necessarily dependent on consciousness. Such mechanisms already exist in single cells and are coded in their genome. They are also widely replicated within ancient, humble, un- minded and un- conscious neuron circuits, and they are very much present deep in human brains. We shall see that managing and safekeeping life is the fundamental premise of biological value. Biological value has influenced the evolution of brain structures, and in any brain it influences almost every step of brain operations. It is expressed as simply as in the release of chemical molecules related to reward and punishment, or as elaborately as in our social emotions and in sophisticated reasoning. Biological value naturally guides and colors, so to speak, almost everything that happens inside our very minded, very conscious brains. Biological value has the status of a principle.
    In brief, the conscious mind emerges within the history of life regulation. Life regulation, a dynamic process known as homeostasis for short, begins in unicellular living creatures, such as a bacterial cell or a simple amoeba, which do not have a brain but are capable of adaptive behavior. It progresses in individuals whose behavior is managed by simple brains, as is the case with worms, and it continues its march in individuals whose brains generate both behavior and mind (insects and fish being examples). I am ready to believe that whenever brains begin to generate primordial feelings—and that could be quite early in evolutionary history—organisms acquire an early form of sentience. From there on, an organized self process could develop and be added to the mind, thereby providing the beginning of elaborate conscious minds. Reptiles are contenders for this distinction, for example; birds make even stronger contenders; and mammals get the award and then some.
    Most species whose brains generate a self do so at core level. Humans have both core self and autobiographical self. A number of mammals are likely to have both as well, namely wolves, our ape cousins, marine mammals and elephants, cats, and, of course, that off-the-scale species called the domestic dog.
VII
     
    The march of mind progress does not end with the arrival of the modest levels of self. Throughout the evolution of mammals, especially primates, minds become ever more complex, memory and reasoning expanding notably, and the self processes enlarge their scope. The core self remains, but it is gradually surrounded by an autobiographical self, whose neural and mental natures are very different from those of the core self. We become able to use a part of our mind’s operation to monitor the operation of other parts. The conscious minds of humans, armed with such complex selves and supported by even greater capabilities of memory, reasoning, and language, engender the instruments of