Self Comes to Mind

terms that connect with the ideas of philosophers such as Franz Brentano. 1 Brentano actually saw the intentional attitude as the hallmark of mental phenomena and believed that physical phenomena lacked intentional attitudes and aboutness. This does not seem to be the case. As we saw in Chapter 2 , single cells also appear to have intentions and aboutness in much the same sense. In other words, neither a whole brain nor single cells deliberately intend anything with their behavior, but their stance is as if they do. This is one more reason to deny the intuitive abyss between the mental and the physical worlds. 2 On this count, at least, there certainly is not one.
    The brain’s aboutness vis-à-vis the body has two other spectacular consequences, and they too are indispensable to resolving both the mind-body and consciousness conundra. The pervasive, exhaustive mapping of the body covers not only what we usually regard as the body proper—the musculoskeletal system, the internal organs, the internal milieu—but also the special devices of perception placed at specific sites of that body, the body’s spying outposts—the smell and taste mucosae, the tactile elements of the skin, the ears, the eyes. Those devices are located in the body as much as the heart and guts are, but they occupy privileged positions. Let’s say they are set like diamonds in a frame. All those devices have a part made of “old flesh” (the armature for the diamonds) and another made of the delicate and special “neural probe” (the diamonds). Important examples of old-flesh armature include the external ear, the ear canal, the middle ear with its ossicles and the tympanic membrane; and the skin and muscles around the eyes, and the varied components of the eyeball besides the retina, such as the lens and the pupil. Examples of the delicate neural probes include the cochlea in the inner ear, with its sophisticated hair cells and sound-mapping capabilities; and the retina at the back of the eyeball, onto which optical images are projected. The combination of old flesh and neural probe constitutes a body border. Signals hailing from the world must cross that border in order to enter the brain. They cannot simply enter the brain directly.
    Because of this curious arrangement the representation of the world external to the body can come into the brain only via the body itself , namely via its surface. The body and the surrounding environment interact with each other, and the changes caused in the body by that interaction are mapped in the brain. It is certainly true that the mind learns of the outside world via the brain, but it is equally true that the brain can be informed only via the body.
    The second special consequence of the brain’s body aboutness is no less notable: by mapping its body in an integrated manner, the brain manages to create the critical component of what will become the self. We shall see that body mapping is a key to the elucidation of the problem of consciousness.
    Finally, as if the above facts were not quite extraordinary, the close relationships of body and brain are essential to understanding something else that is central to our lives: spontaneous bodily feelings, emotions, and emotional feelings.
Body Mapping
     
    How does the brain accomplish the mapping of the body? By treating the body proper and its parts as any other object, one might say, but that would hardly do justice to the problem, because as far as the brain is concerned, the body proper is more than just any object: it is the central object of brain mapping, the very first focus of its attentions. (Whenever I can, I use the term body to mean “body proper” and leave aside the brain. The brain is also part of the body, of course, but it has a particular status: it is the body part that can communicate to every other body part and toward which every other body part communicates.)
    William James had an inkling of the extent to which the body needed to be brought to mind, but he could not know how intricate the mechanisms responsible for bringing about the body-to-mind transfer would turn out to be. 3 The body uses both chemical signals and neural signals to communicate with the brain, and the range of conveyed information is broader and more detailed than he could have envisioned. In effect, I am now convinced that talking merely about body-to-brain communication misses the point. Although part of the signaling from body to brain results in a