Self Comes to Mind

provided him with a sense of agency as well. The mental contents that a self process would have surveyed were probably impoverished. Under the circumstances, our man was confined to an aimless, unsituated now. The self as material me was mostly gone, and so was, even more certainly, the self as knower.
    Being awake, having a mind, and having a self are different brain processes, concocted by the operation of different brain components. They merge seamlessly on any given day, in a remarkable functional continuum inside our brains, permitting and revealing different manifestations of behavior. But they are not “compartments” as such. They are not rooms divided by rigid walls because biological processes are not at all like artifacts engineered by humans. Still, in their messy, fuzzy, biological way, they are separable, and if we do not try to discover how they differ and where the subtle transitions occur, we have no prayer of understanding how the whole thing works.
    I would say that if one is awake and there are contents in one’s mind, consciousness is the result of adding a self function to mind that orients the mental contents to one’s needs and thus produces subjectivity. The self function is not some know-all homunculus but rather an emergence, within the virtual screening process we call mind, of yet another virtual element: an imaged protagonist of our mental events.
Completing a Working Definition
     
    When neurological disease breaks consciousness apart, emotional responses are notoriously absent, and the corresponding feelings are presumably missing as well. Patients with disturbances of consciousness fail to exhibit signs of ongoing emotion. Their faces have a blank, vacuous expression. Minor signs of muscular animation are absent, a remarkable feature given that even a so-called poker face is emotively animated and betrays subtle signs of expectation, glibness, contempt, and the like. Patients in any variant of akinetic mute or vegetative state, not to mention coma, have little or no emotional expression. The same is true of deep anesthesia but not, predictably, of sleep, in which emotional expressions may appear when the sleep stage permits paradoxical consciousness.
    From a behavioral standpoint, the conscious mind state of others is hallmarked by awake, coherent, purposeful behavior that includes signs of ongoing emotional reactions. Very early in our lives we learn to confirm, based on the direct verbal reports we hear, that such emotional reactions are systematically accompanied by feelings. Later we assume, from looking at human beings around us, that they are experiencing certain feelings, even if they do not say a single word and no word is addressed to them. In fact, even the subtlest of emotional expressions can betray, to a well-tuned, syntonic, empathetic mind, the presence of feelings, no matter how quiet they may be. This process of feeling attribution has nothing whatsoever to do with language. It is based on the highly trained observation of postures and faces as they change and move about.
    Why are emotions such a telltale sign of consciousness? Because the actual execution of most emotions is carried out by the periaqueductal gray (PAG) in close cooperation with the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) and the parabrachial nucleus (PBN), the structures whose ensemble engenders bodily feelings (such as primordial feelings) and the variations thereof that we call emotional feelings. This ensemble is often damaged by the neurological lesions that cause loss of consciousness, and certain anesthetics that target it can render it dysfunctional.
    We shall see in the next chapter that just as signs of emotion are part of the externally observable conscious state, experiences of bodily feelings are a deep and vital part of consciousness from a first-person, introspective perspective.
Kinds of Consciousness
     
    Consciousness fluctuates. Below a certain threshold consciousness is not operating, and along a scale of levels it operates in the most efficient way. Let us call this the “intensity” scale of consciousness, and let us exemplify those very different levels. In some moments you feel sleepy and are about to vanish into the arms of Morpheus; in another you are participating in an intense debate that calls for a keen awareness to the details that keep cropping up. The intensity scale ranges from dull to sharp, with all the shades in between.
    Besides intensity, however, there is another