Self Comes to Mind

complementing those of the consciousness-research pioneers, have yielded a powerful collection of facts regarding the brain structures that are or are not involved in making human minds conscious. We can build on that foundation.
    The other legacy to be acknowledged consists of a long tradition of formulating conceptions of mind and consciousness. It has a rich history, as long and varied as the history of philosophy. From the wealth of its offerings, I have come to favor the writings of William James as an anchor for my own thinking, although this does not imply a full endorsement of his positions on consciousness and especially on feeling. 5
    The title of this book, as well as its first pages, leave no doubt that in approaching the conscious mind, I privilege the self. I believe conscious minds arise when a self process is added onto a basic mind process. When selves do not occur within minds, those minds are not conscious in the proper sense. This is a predicament faced by humans whose self process is suspended by dreamless sleep, anesthesia, or brain disease.
    Defining the self process that I regard as so indispensable for consciousness, however, is easier said than done. That is why William James is so helpful to this preamble. James wrote eloquently about the importance of the self, and yet he also noted that, on many occasions, the presence of the self is so subtle that the contents of the mind dominate consciousness as they stream along. We need to confront this elusiveness and decide on its consequences before we go any further. Is there a self, or is there not? If there is a self, is it present whenever we are conscious, or is it not?
    The answers are unequivocal. There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious. We can consider the self process from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a dynamic object— the dynamic object constituted by certain workings of minds, certain traits of behavior, and a certain history of life. The other vantage point is that of the self as knower , the process that gives a focus to our experiences and eventually lets us reflect on those experiences. Combining the two vantage points produces the dual notion of self used throughout the book. As we shall see, the two notions correspond to two stages of evolutionary development of the self, the self-as-knower having had its origin in the self-as-object. In everyday life each notion corresponds to a level of operation of the conscious mind, the self-as-object being simpler in scope than the self-as-knower.
    From either vantage point, the process has varied scopes and intensities and its manifestations vary with the occasions. The self can operate on a subtle register, as “a hint half hinted” of the presence of a living organism, 6 or on a salient register that includes personhood and identity for the owner of the mind. Now you sense it, now you don’t, but you always feel it, is my way of summing up the situation.
    James thought that the self-as-object, the material me, was the sum total of all that a man could call his—“not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account.” 7 Leaving aside the political incorrectness, I agree. But James also thought something else with which I am in even greater agreement: what allows the mind to know that such dominions exist and belong to their mental owners—body, mind, past and present, and all the rest—is that the perception of any of these items generates emotions and feelings, and, in turn, the feelings accomplish the separation between the contents that belong to the self and those that do not. From my perspective, such feelings operate as markers . They are the emotion-based signals I designate as somatic markers. 8 When contents that pertain to the self occur in the mind stream, they provoke the appearance of a marker, which joins the mind stream as an image, juxtaposed to the image that prompted it. These feelings accomplish a distinction between self and nonself. They are, in a nutshell, feelings of knowing . We shall see that the construction of a conscious mind depends, at several stages, on the generation of such feelings. As for my working definition of the material me, the self-as-object, it is as follows: a dynamic