Self Comes to Mind

compass of life regulation, the brain systems that led to conscious minds prevailed because they offered the widest possibilities of adaptation and survival with the sort of regulation capable of maintaining and expanding well-being.
    In brief, single-cell organisms with a nucleus have an unminded and unconscious will to live and manage life suitably enough, for as long as certain genes allow them. Brains expanded the possibilities of life management even when they did not produce minds, let alone conscious minds. For that reason they too prevailed. By the time minds and consciousness were added to the mix, the possibilities of regulation expanded even more and made way for the kind of management that occurs not just within one organism but across many organisms, in societies. Consciousness enabled humans to repeat the leitmotif of life regulation by means of a collection of cultural instruments—economic exchange, religious beliefs, social conventions and ethical rules, laws, arts, science, technology. Still, the survival intention of the eukaryotic cell and the survival intention implicit in human consciousness are one and the same.
    Behind the imperfect but admirable edifice that cultures and civilizations have constructed for us, life regulation remains the basic issue we face. Just as important, the motivation behind most achievements in human cultures and civilizations rests with that precise issue and with the need to manage the behaviors of humans engaged in addressing that issue. Life regulation is at the root of a lot that needs explaining in biology in general and in humanity in particular: the existence of brains; the existence of pain, pleasure, emotions, and feelings; social behaviors; religions; economies and their markets and financial institutions; moral behaviors; laws and justice; politics; art, technology, and science—a very modest list, as the reader can see.
    Life and the conditions that are integral to it—the irrepressible mandate to survive and the complicated business of managing survival in an organism, with one cell or with trillions—were the root cause of the emergence and evolution of brains, the most elaborate management devices assembled by evolution, as well as the root cause of everything that followed from the development of ever more elaborate brains, inside ever more elaborate bodies, living in ever more complex environments.
    When one looks at most any aspect of brain functions through the filter of this idea—that a brain exists for managing life inside a body—the oddities and mysteries of some of the traditional categories of psychology (emotion, perception, memory, language, intelligence, and consciousness) become less odd and far less mysterious. In fact, they develop a transparent reasonableness, an inevitable and endearing logic. How could we be any different, those functions seem to be asking, given the job that needs to be done?

PART II
What’s in a Brain
That a Mind Can Be?
     

3
Making Maps and
Making Images
     
Maps and Images
     
    While the management of life is unquestionably the primary function of human brains, it is hardly their most distinctive feature. As we have seen, life can be managed without a nervous system, let alone a full-fledged brain. Modest unicellular organisms do pretty well at housekeeping.
    The distinctive feature of brains such as the one we own is their uncanny ability to create maps. Mapping is essential for sophisticated management, mapping and life management going hand in hand. When the brain makes maps, it informs itself. The information contained in the maps can be used nonconsciously to guide motor behavior efficaciously, a most desirable consequence considering that survival depends on taking the right action. But when brains make maps, they are also creating images, the main currency of our minds. Ultimately consciousness allows us to experience maps as images, to manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning to them.
    Maps are constructed when we interact with objects, such as a person, a machine, a place, from the outside of the brain toward its interior. I cannot emphasize the word interaction enough. It reminds us that making maps, which is essential for improving actions as noted above, often occurs in a setting of action to begin with. Action and maps, movements and mind, are part of an unending cycle, an idea suggestively captured by Rodolfo Llinás when he attributes the birth of the mind to the brain’s control