Self Comes to Mind

environment (for instance, a certain kind of odor), they will come in groups. Needless to say, they do not really know what they are doing, let alone why. But they do what they do because their exceedingly simple brains, without any mind to speak of and even less proper consciousness, use signals from the environment to engage one kind of behavior or the other.
    Now imagine that I had described the situation of C. elegans in the abstract, outlining the conditions and the behaviors but withholding the fact that they were worms, and now imagine that I had asked you to think as a sociologist and comment on the situation. I suspect you would have detected evidence of interindividual cooperation, and you might even have diagnosed altruistic concerns. You might even have thought that I was speaking of complex creatures, perhaps early humans. The first time I read Cornelia Bargmann’s description of these findings, I thought of trade unions and of safety in numbers. 10 And yet C. elegans is just a worm.
    Another implication of the fact that ideal homeostatic states are the most valuable possession of a living organism is that the fundamental advantage of consciousness, at any level of the phenomenon, derives from improving life regulation in ever more complex environments. 11
    Survival in new ecological niches was helped by brains complex enough to create minds, a development that, as I explain in Part II, is based on the construction of neural maps and images. Once minds emerged, even if they were not yet imbued with full-scale consciousness, automated life regulation was optimized. Brains that produced images had available more details of the conditions inside and outside the organisms and thus could generate more differentiated and effective responses than unminded brains. However, when the minds of nonhuman species could become conscious minds, automated regulation gained a powerful ally, a means to focus the travails of survival on the budding self that now stood for the struggling organism. In humans, of course, as consciousness coevolved with memory and reason to permit offline planning and deliberative thinking, that ally has become even more powerful.
    Amazingly, self-concerned life regulation always coexists with the machinery of automated life regulation that any conscious creature inherited from its evolutionary past. This is very true of humans. Most of our own regulatory activity goes on unconsciously, and a good thing too. You would not want to manage your endocrine system or your immunity consciously because you would have no way of controlling chaotic oscillations rapidly enough. At best, it would be the equivalent of flying a modern jet plane by hand—which is not a trivial undertaking and does require one to master all the contingencies and all the maneuvers needed to prevent a stall. At worst, it would be like investing the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market. You would not even want to have absolute control over something as simple as your breathing—you might decide to swim the English Channel underwater, holding your breath, and risk dying in the process. Fortunately, our automated homeostatic devices will never allow such foolery.
    Consciousness has improved adaptability and allowed the beneficiaries to create novel solutions to the problems of life and survival, in virtually any conceivable environment, anywhere on earth, up in the air and in outer space, under the water, in deserts and on mountains. We have evolved to adapt to a large number of niches and are able to learn to adapt to an even greater number. We never sprouted wings or gills, but we invented machines that have wings or can rocket us into the stratosphere, that sail the oceans or travel twenty thousand leagues under those oceans. We have invented the material conditions to live anywhere we wish. The amoeba cannot; nor can the worm, the fish, the frog, the bird, the squirrel, the cat, the dog, or even our very smart cousin, the chimpanzee.
    When human brains began concocting conscious human minds, the game changed radically. We moved from simple regulation, focused on the survival of the organism, to progressively more deliberated regulation, based on a mind equipped with identity and personhood and now actively seeking not mere survival but certain ranges of well-being. Quite a leap, albeit assembled, so far as we can see, on biological continuities.
    If brains prevailed in evolution because they offered a larger