Self Comes to Mind

purpose of those signals is regulatory—the brain needs to receive information describing the state of body systems so that it can organize, nonconsciously or consciously, an appropriate response. Feelings of emotion are the obvious result of such signaling, although feelings have come to loom large in our conscious life and social relationships. In the same way, it is quite possible, indeed likely, that other body processes, some already known, others to be discovered, will turn out to influence our conscious experiences at many levels.
    The other underestimation pertains to the brain itself. The idea that we have a firm grasp of what the brain is and what it does is pure folly, but we always know more than we did the year before and much, much more than one decade ago. Problems that seem intolerably mysterious and unbearably hard are likely to be amenable to biological account, the question being not if but when.

PART IV
Long After
Consciousness
     

11
Living with Consciousness
     
Why Consciousness Prevailed
     
    Traits and functions rise or fall in the history of life depending on how much they contribute to the success of living organisms. The most direct way of explaining why consciousness has prevailed in evolution is to say that it has contributed significantly to the survival of the species so equipped. Consciousness came, saw, and conquered. It has flourished. It seems to be here to stay.
    What did consciousness actually contribute? The answer is a large variety of apparent and not-so-apparent advantages in the management of life. Even at the simplest levels, consciousness helps the optimization of responses to environmental conditions. As processed in the conscious mind, images provide details about the environment, and those details can be used to increase the precision of a much-needed response, for example, the exact movement that will neutralize a threat or guarantee the capture of a prey. But image precision is only a part of the advantage of a conscious mind. The lion’s share of the advantage, I suspect, comes from the fact that in a conscious mind the processing of environmental images is oriented by a particular set of internal images, those of the subject’s living organism as represented in the self. The self focuses the mind process, it imbues the adventure of encountering other objects and events with a motivation, it infuses the exploration of the world outside the brain with a concern for the first and foremost problem facing the organism: the successful regulation of life. That concern is naturally generated by the self process, whose foundation lies in bodily feelings, primordial and modified. The spontaneously, intrinsically feeling self signals directly, as a result of the valence and intensity of its affective states, the degree of concern and need that are present at every moment.
    As the process of consciousness became more complex, and as coevolved functions of memory, reasoning, and language were brought into play, further benefits of consciousness were introduced. Those benefits relate largely to planning and deliberation. The advantages here are legion. It became possible to survey the possible future and to either delay or inhibit automatic responses. An example of this evolutionarily novel capacity is delayed gratification, the calculated trading of something good now for something better later—or the forgoing of something good now when the survey of the future suggests that it will cause something bad as well. This is the trend of consciousness that brought us a finer management of basic homeostasis and, ultimately, the beginnings of sociocultural homeostasis (to which I will turn later in this chapter).
    Plenty of conscious, highly successful behaviors are present in many nonhuman species with complex enough brains: the examples are evident all around us, most spectacularly in mammals. In humans, however, thanks to expanded memory, reasoning, and language, consciousness has reached its current peak. I suggest that the peak came from the strengthening of the knower self and of its ability to reveal the predicaments and opportunities of the human condition. Some may say that in that revelation lies a tragic loss, of innocence no less, for all that the revelation tells us of the flaws of nature and of the drama we face, for all the temptations it lays down before human eyes, for all the evil it unmasks. Be that as it may, it is not for us to choose. Consciousness certainly