Self Comes to Mind

malevolence would probably not have worked were it not for Othello’s natural vulnerability to jealousy. The cognitive asymmetry of sexuality in men and women, many parameters of which are engraved in our genomes, lurks behind the behavior of these characters and keeps them ever modern. The intense male aggression of Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses has equally deep roots in the genetic unconscious. The same may be said of two characters, Oedipus and Hamlet, destroyed either by the breaking of the incest taboo or by the unstated inclination to break it. The Freudian interpretation of these timeless characters merges with their evolutionary origins, pointing to some highly frequent features of human nature. Theater and the novel, as well as film, their twentieth-century heir, have greatly benefited from the genomic unconscious.
    The genomic unconscious is partly responsible for the sameness that hallmarks the repertoire of human behavior. How remarkable it is, then, that we consistently break away from monotonous universals and instead, by dint of artistry or the sheer magic of a human encounter, create an infinite set of life variations that delights and astonishes.
The Feeling of Conscious Will
     
    How frequently are we guided by a well-rehearsed cognitive unconscious, trained under the supervision of conscious reflection to observe consciously conceived ideals, wants, and plans? How frequently are we guided by unconscious, deeply set, biologically ancient biases, appetites, desires? I suspect that most of us, weak but well-meaning sinners, operate on both registers, more on one or more on the other, depending on the situation and the hour of the day.
    Whatever register we operate on, somewhat virtuous or somewhat not, in-the-moment acting is inevitably accompanied by the impression, sometimes false, sometimes not, that we acted there and then, under full conscious control our self plunged headlong into whatever we did. That impression is a feeling , a feeling that arises when our organisms engage in a new perception or initiate a new action, none other than the feeling of knowing that I discussed earlier as part and parcel of the assembled self. Someone who shares this view is Dan Wegner, who describes conscious will as “the somatic marker of personal authorship, an emotion that authenticates the action’s owner as the self. With the feeling of doing an act, we get a conscious sensation of will attached to the action.” 9 In other words, we are not mere “conscious automata,” as T. H. Huxley considered us to be, a century ago, unable to control our existence. 10 When the mind is informed of the actions taken by our organism, the feeling associated with the information signifies that the actions were engendered by our self. Both information and authentication of ongoing actions are essential to motivate the deliberation of future actions. Without that sort of felt, validated information, we would not be able to assume moral responsibility for the actions taken by our organism.
Educating the Cognitive Unconscious
     
    Greater control over the vagaries of human behavior can come only from an accumulation of knowledge and from consideration of the discovered facts. Taking the time to analyze facts, to evaluate the outcome of decisions, and to ponder the emotional results of those decisions is the path to building a practical guide otherwise known as wisdom. On the basis of wisdom, we can deliberate and hope to steer our behavior within the frame of cultural conventions and ethical rules that have informed our biographies and the world we live in. We can also react to those conventions and rules, face the conflict that ensues when we disagree with them, and even attempt to modify them. A good example is the conflict faced by conscientious objectors.
    No less important, we need to be aware of the peculiar hurdle faced by our consciously deliberated decisions—they have to find a way into the cognitive unconscious in order to permeate the action machinery—and we need to facilitate that influence. One way to transpose the hurdle would be the intense conscious rehearsal of the procedures and actions we wish to see nonconsciously realized, a process of repeated practice that results in mastering a performing skill , a consciously composed psychological action program gone underground.
    I am not inventing anything new here but merely outlining a practical mechanism deduced from what I presume the neural operations of