Self Comes to Mind

the misleading intuitions prompted by the unaided self.
Overcoming a Misleading Intuition
     
    It is arguable that cultures and civilizations would not have come to pass in the absence of consciousness, thus making consciousness a notable development in biological evolution. And yet the very nature of consciousness poses serious problems for those attempting to elucidate its biology. Viewing consciousness from where we stand today, mindful and armed with a self, can be blamed for an understandable but troubling distortion of the history of mind and consciousness studies. Viewed from the top, the mind acquires a special status, discontinuous with the remainder of the organism to which it belongs. Viewed from the top, the mind appears to be not just very complex, which it certainly is, but also different in kind from the biological tissues and functions of the organism that begets it. In practice, we adopt two sorts of optic when we observe our beings: we see the mind with eyes that are turned inward; and we see biological tissues with eyes that are turned outward. (To boot, we use microscopes to extend our vision.) Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the mind appears to have a nonphysical nature and that its phenomena appear to belong to another category.
    Viewing the mind as a nonphysical phenomenon, discontinuous with the biology that creates and sustains it, is responsible for placing the mind outside the laws of physics, a discrimination to which other brain phenomena are not usually subject. The most striking manifestation of this oddity is the attempt to connect the conscious mind to heretofore undescribed properties of matter and, for example, explain consciousness in terms of quantic phenomena. The rationale for this idea appears to be as follows: the conscious mind seems mysterious; because quantum physics remains mysterious, perhaps the two mysteries are connected. 13
    Given our incomplete knowledge of both biology and physics, one should be cautious before dismissing alternative accounts. After all, in spite of neurobiology’s remarkable success, our understanding of the human brain is quite incomplete. Nonetheless, the possibility of explaining mind and consciousness parsimoniously, within the confines of neurobiology as currently conceived, remains open; it should not be abandoned unless the technical and theoretical resources of neurobiology are exhausted, an unlikely prospect at the moment.
    Our intuition tells us that the mercurial, fleeting business of the mind lacks physical extension. I believe this intuition is false and attributable to the limitations of the unaided self. I see no reason to give to it more credence than to previously evident and powerful intuitions such as the pre-Copernican view of what the sun does to the earth or, for that matter, the view that the mind resides in the heart. Things are not always what they seem. White light is a composite of the colors of the rainbow, although that is not apparent to the naked eye. 14
An Integrated Perspective
     
    Most of the progress made to date on the neurobiology of conscious minds has been based on combining three perspectives: (1) the direct-witness perspective on the individual conscious mind, which is personal, private, and unique to each one of us; (2) the behavioral perspective, which allows us to observe the telltale actions of others whom we have reason to believe also have conscious minds; and (3) the brain perspective, which allows us to study certain aspects of brain function in individuals whose conscious mind states are presumed to be either present or absent. Evidence from these three perspectives, even when intelligently aligned, is usually not enough to generate a smooth transition across the three kinds of phenomena—introspective, first-person inspection; external behaviors; and brain events. In particular, there appears to be a major gap between the evidence from first-person introspection and the evidence from brain events. How can we bridge such gaps?
    A fourth perspective is needed, one that requires a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. In earlier work I advanced the idea of turning life regulation into the support and justification of self and consciousness, and that idea suggested a path into this new perspective: a search for antecedents of self and consciousness in the evolutionary past. 15 Accordingly, the fourth perspective is grounded on facts from