Self Comes to Mind

move to the foreground—plans, occupations, fantasies, the sort of images that creep up when one is stuck on the Santa Monica Freeway. But online consciousness downshifted to core self and distracted to another topic is still normal consciousness. We cannot say the same about the consciousness of those who sleepwalk, or who are under hypnosis, or who experiment with “mind-altering” substances. Relative to the latter, the catalog of the resulting states of abnormal consciousness is long and varied and includes the most inventive aberrations of mind and self. wakefulness breaks down as well, sleep or stupor being an all-too-common endpoint of such adventures.
    In conclusion, the degree to which the protagonist self is present in our minds varies greatly with the circumstances, from a richly detailed and fully situated portrayal of who we are to an ever-so-faint hint that we do own our mind and our thoughts and our actions. But I must insist on the idea that even at its most subtle and faint, the self is a necessary presence in the mind. To say that when one is climbing a mountain, or when I am writing this very sentence, the self is nowhere to be found is not quite accurate. In such instances the self is not on prominent display for certain; it conveniently retreats to the background and makes room, in our image-making brain, for all the other things that require processing space—such as the face of the mountain or the thoughts I want to commit to the page. But I venture that if the self process were to collapse and disappear completely, the mind would lose its orientation, the ability to gather its parts. One’s thoughts would be freewheeling, unclaimed by an owner. Our real-world efficacy would drop to little or nothing, and we would be lost for those observing us. What would we look like? Well, we would look unconscious.
    I am afraid it is not easy dealing with the self because, depending on the perspective, the self can be so many things. It can be an “object” of research for psychologists and neuroscientists; it can be a provider of knowledge to the mind in which it emerges; it can be subtle and retreating behind a curtain or assertively present at the footlights; it can be confined to the here and now or encompass a whole life history; finally, some of these registers can be mixed, as when a knower self is subtle and yet autobiographic, or else prominently present but concerned only with the here and now. The self is indeed a movable feast.
Human and Nonhuman Consciousness
     
    Just as consciousness is not a thing, the core and extended/autobiographical kinds of consciousness are not rigid categories. I have always envisioned many grades between the core and autobiographical endpoints of the scale. But carving out these different kinds of consciousness has a practical payoff: it allows us to propose that the lower notches of the consciousness scale are by no means human alone. In all probability they are present in numerous nonhuman species that have brains complex enough to construct them. The fact that human consciousness, at its highest reaches, is hugely complicated, far-reaching, and therefore distinctive is so obvious that it does not require mention. The reader would be surprised, however, at how comparable comments of mine have, in the past, led some people to take offense, either because I was attributing too little consciousness to nonhuman species or because I was diminishing the exceptional nature of human consciousness by including animals. Wish me luck.
    No one can prove satisfactorily that nonhuman, nonlanguaged beings have consciousness, core or otherwise, although it is reasonable to triangulate the substantial evidence we have available and conclude that it is highly likely that they do.
    The triangulation would run like this: (1) if a species has behaviors that are best explained by a brain with mind processes rather than by a brain with mere dispositions for action (such as reflexes); and (2) if the species has a brain with all the components that are described in the chapters ahead as necessary to make conscious minds in humans; (3) then, dear reader, the species is conscious. At the end of the day, I am ready to take any manifestation of animal behavior that suggests the presence of feelings as a sign that consciousness should not be far behind.
    Core consciousness does not require language and must have preceded language, obviously in nonhuman species but also in humans. In