Self Comes to Mind

on the brain’s capacity to hold expansive memory records not only of motor skills but also of facts and events, in particular, personal facts and events, those that make up the scaffolding of biography and personhood and individual identity. It depends on the ability to reconstruct and manipulate memory records in a working brain space parallel to the perceptual space, an offline holding area where time can be suspended during a delay and decisions freed from the tyranny of immediate responses. It depends on the brain’s ability to produce not only mental representations that imitate reality slavishly and mimetically but also representations that symbolize actions and objects and individuals. The rebellious self depends on the brain’s ability to communicate mental states, especially feeling states, through gestures of body and hands, as well as through the voice, in the form of musical tones and verbal language. Last, it depends on the invention of external memory systems parallel to those held by each brain, by which I mean the pictorial representations offered by early painting, carvings, and sculpture, tools, jewelry, funerary architecture, and, long after the emergence of language, written records, certainly the most important variety of external memory until quite recently.
    Once autobiographical selves can operate on the basis of knowledge etched in brain circuits and in external records of stone, clay, or paper, humans become capable of hitching their individual biological needs to the accumulated sapience. Thus begins a long process of inquiry, reflection, and response, expressed throughout recorded human history in myths, religions, the arts, and various structures invented to govern social behavior—constructed morality, justice systems, economics, politics, science, and technology. The ultimate consequences of consciousness come by way of memory. This is memory acquired through a filter of biological value and animated by reason.
The Consequences of a Reflective Self
     
    Imagine early humans sometime after verbal language established itself as a means of communication. Imagine conscious individuals whose brains were armed with many of the abilities we find in humans today and who sought much of what we seek today—food, sex, shelter, security, comfort, dignity, perhaps transcendence. In that environment competition for resources was a dominant problem, conflict would be abundant, and cooperation was essential. Reward, punishment, and learning oriented their behaviors. Let us assume that they possessed a range of emotions resembling ours. Attachment, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and anger were no doubt present, along with emotions that governed sociality such as trust, shame, guilt, compassion, contempt, pride, awe, and admiration. And let us assume these early humans were already animated by an intense curiosity regarding both their physical environment and other living beings, of the same species or not. If twentieth-century studies of relatively isolated tribes are any guide, they were also curious about themselves and told stories about their origin and their destiny. The engines behind such curiosity are relatively easy to envision. Early humans would experience affection and attachment for others with whom they bonded, especially mates and offspring, and they would have experienced the grief that comes from breaking those bonds, or from witnessing others in suffering, or experiencing their own suffering. They also would have experienced and witnessed moments of joy and satisfaction, and times of success at the endeavors of hunting, courtship, securing shelter, war, the raising of the young.
    This systematic discovery of the drama of human existence and of its possible compensations was arguably possible only after full-fledged human consciousness developed—a mind with an autobiographical self capable of guiding reflective deliberation and gathering knowledge. Eventually, given the probable intellectual capability of early humans, it is likely that they would have wondered about their status in the universe, something akin to the where from and where to questions that still haunt us today, thousands of years later. That is when the rebellious self comes of age. That is when myths are developed to account for the human condition and its workings; when social conventions and rules are elaborated, leading to the beginnings of a true morality that sits over and above promoral behaviors such as