Self Comes to Mind

smells, tastes, pains, pleasures, and the like—in brief, images. The images in our minds are the brain’s momentary maps of everything and of anything, inside our body and around it, concrete as well as abstract, actual or previously recorded in memory. The words I am using to bring these ideas to you were first formed, however briefly and sketchily, as auditory, visual, or somatosensory images of phonemes and morphemes, before I implemented them on the page in their written version. Likewise, the written words, now printed before your eyes, are first processed by you as verbal images (visual images of written language) before their action on the brain promotes the evocation of yet other images, of a nonverbal kind. The nonverbal kinds of images are those that help you display mentally the concepts that correspond to words. The feelings that make up the background of each mental instant and that largely signify aspects of the body state are images as well. Perception, in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill.
    Images represent physical properties of entities and their spatial and temporal relationships, as well as their actions. Some images, which probably result from the brain’s making maps of itself making maps, are actually quite abstract. They describe patterns of occurrence of objects in time and space, the spatial relationships and movement of objects in terms of velocity and trajectory, and so forth. Some images find their way into musical compositions or mathematical descriptions. The process of mind is a continuous flow of such images, some of which correspond to actual, ongoing business outside the brain, while some are being reconstituted from memory in the process of recall. Minds are a subtle, flowing combination of actual images and recalled images, in ever-changing proportions. The mind’s images tend to be logically interrelated, certainly when they correspond to events in the external world or in the body, which are, in and of themselves, governed by laws of physics and biology that define what we regard as logical. Of course, when you are daydreaming, you may produce illogical continuities of images, the same if you are having vertigo—the room does not really spin, the table is not turning on you, although the images tell you otherwise—and the same if you have taken a hallucinogenic drug. Such special situations apart, more often than not the flow of images moves forward in time, speedily or slowly, orderly or jumpily, and on occasion the flow moves along not just in one sequence but in several. Sometimes the sequences are concurrent, running in parallel; sometimes they intersect and become superposed. When the conscious mind is at its sharpest, the sequence of images is streamlined, barely letting us glimpse the surrounding fringes.
    But in addition to the logic imposed by the unfolding of events in the reality external to the brain—a logical arrangement that the naturally selected circuitry of our brains foreshadows from the very early stages of development—the images in our minds are given more or less saliency in the mental stream according to their value for the individual. And where does that value come from? It comes from the original set of dispositions that orients our life regulation, as well as from the valuations that all images we have gradually acquired in our experience have been accorded, based on the original set of value dispositions during our past history. In other words, minds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted. The mind procession is not about first come, first served. It is about value-stamped selections inserted in a logical frame over time. 4
    Finally, and this is another critical issue, minds can be either nonconscious or conscious. Images continue to be formed, perceptually and in recall, even when we are not conscious of them. Many images never get the favors of consciousness and are not heard from, or seen directly, in the conscious mind. And yet, in many instances, such images are capable of influencing our thinking and our actions. A rich mental process related to reasoning and creative thinking can proceed while we are conscious of something else. I will return to the issues of the nonconscious mind in Part IV.
    In conclusion, images are based on changes that occur in the body and