Self Comes to Mind

kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, behaviors that nature had long been exhibiting prior to the emergence of reflective selves; when religious narratives are created from and around myths, aimed both at explaining the reasons behind the drama and at enforcing the new laws designed to reduce it. In brief, reflective consciousness not only improved the revelation of existence but allowed conscious individuals to begin interpreting the condition and taking action.
    I suggest that the engine behind these cultural developments is the homeostatic impulse . Explanations that rely only on the significant cognitive expansions that bigger and smarter brains produced are insufficient to account for extraordinary developments of culture. In one form or another, the cultural developments manifest the same goal as the form of automated homeostasis to which I have alluded throughout this book. They respond to a detection of imbalance in the life process, and they seek to correct it within the constraints of human biology and of the physical and social environment. The elaboration of moral rules and laws and the development of justice systems responded to the detection of imbalances caused by social behaviors that endangered individuals and the group. The cultural devices created in response to the imbalance aimed at restoring the equilibrium of individuals and of the group. The contribution of economic and political systems, as well as, for example, the development of medicine, responded to functional problems that occurred in the social space and that required correction within that space, lest they compromise the life regulation of the individuals that constituted the group. The imbalances that I am referring to are defined by social and cultural parameters, and the detection of imbalance thus occurs at the high level of the conscious mind, in the brain’s stratosphere, rather than at the subcortical level. I call this overall process “sociocultural homeostasis.” Neurally speaking, sociocultural homeostasis begins at the cortical level, although the emotional reactions to the imbalance immediately engage basic homeostasis as well, testifying once again to the hybrid life regulation of the human brain, high, then low, then high, in an oscillatory course that frequently flirts with chaos but barely avoids it. Conscious reflection and planning of action introduce new possibilities in the governance of life over and above automated homeostasis, in a remarkable novelty of physiology. Conscious reflection can even question and modulate automated homeostasis and decide on an optimal range of homeostasis at a level higher than needed for survival and more consistently conducive to well-being. The imagined, dreamed-of, anticipated well-being has become an active motivator of human action. Sociocultural homeostasis was added on as a new functional layer of life management, but biological homeostasis remained.
    Armed with conscious reflection, organisms whose evolutionary design was centered around life regulation and the tendency toward homeostatic balance invented forms of consolation for those in suffering, rewards for those who helped the sufferers, injunctions for those who caused harm, norms of behavior aimed at preventing harm and promoting good, and a mixture of punishments and preventions, of penalties and praise. The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable—in a word, of how to make it stick—was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution—storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly. Implicit storytelling has created our selves, and it should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures. It also should be no surprise that the sociocultural narratives borrowed their authority from mythical beings presumed to have more power and more knowledge than humans, beings whose existence explained all manner of predicaments and whose activity had the ability to offer succor and modify the future. Over the skies of the Fertile Crescent or in storybook Valhalla, those beings have exerted a fascinating hold on the human mind.
    Individuals and groups whose brains made them capable of inventing or using such narratives to improve themselves and the societies they lived in became successful enough for the architectural traits of those brains to be selected, individually and groupwise, and for their frequency to