Self Comes to Mind

picture that cannot be accommodated in a single book, let alone a chapter. Nonetheless we can be certain that the rebel did not develop suddenly. Minds constituted by maps of diverse sensory modalities were helpful in improving life regulation, but even when the maps became properly felt mental images, they were not independent, let alone rebellious. Felt images of the organism’s interior made for improved survival and created a potentially nice spectacle but there was no one to watch it. When minds first added a core self to their stock, which is when consciousness really began, we were getting closer to the mark but not quite yet there. A simple protagonist was a clear advantage, because it generated a firm connection between life-regulation needs and the profusion of mental images that the brain was forming about the world around it. The guidance of behavior was optimized. But the independence I am talking about could surface only once the self was complex enough to reveal a fuller picture of the human condition, once living organisms could learn that pain and loss were at stake but so were pleasure and flourishing and folly, once there were questions to be asked about the human past and the human future, once imagination could show how possibly to reduce suffering, minimize loss, and increase the probability of happiness and fancy. That is when the rebel began to take human existence in new directions, some defiant, some accommodating, but all based on thinking through knowledge, mythical knowledge at first, scientific knowledge later, but knowledge nonetheless.
Self Comes to Mind
     
    How wonderful it would be to discover where and when the robust self came to mind and began generating the biological revolution called culture. But in spite of the ongoing research efforts of those who interpret and date the human records that have survived time, we are not able to answer such questions. It is certain that the self matured slowly and gradually but unevenly, and that the process was taking place in several parts of the world, not necessarily at the same time. Still, it is known that our most direct human ancestors were walking the earth about 200,000 years ago, and that around 30,000 years ago humans were producing cave paintings, sculptures, rock carvings, metal castings, and jewelry, and possibly making music. The proposed date for the Chauvet cave, in Ardèche, is 32,000 years ago, and by 17,000 years ago the Lascaux cave was already a Sistine Chapel of sorts, with hundreds of complex paintings and thousands of carvings, in a complex mixture of figures and abstract signs. A mind capable of symbolic processing was obviously at work there. The exact relation between the emergence of language and the explosion of artistic expression and sophisticated tool-making that distinguishes Homo sapiens is not known. But we do know that for tens of thousands of years humans had engaged in burials elaborate enough to require special treatment of the dead and the equivalent of tombstones. It is difficult to imagine how such behaviors would have occurred in the absence of an explicit concern for life, a first stab at interpreting life and assigning it value, emotional of course, but intellectual as well. And it is inconceivable that concern or interpretation could arise in the absence of a robust self.
    The development of writing, about five thousand years ago, provides a handful of solid evidence, and by the time of the Homeric poems, which are likely to be less than three thousand years old, autobiographical selves had undoubtedly come to human minds. Still, I sympathize with Julian Jaynes’s claim that something of great import may have happened to the human mind during the relatively brief interval of time between the events narrated in the Iliad and those that make up the Odyssey . 13 As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our advantage. Be that as it may, the self that I envision as capable of rebelliousness is a recent development, on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time. That self draws on features of the human brain acquired, in all likelihood, during the long period of the Pleistocene. It depends