Self Comes to Mind

known , in a particular context. Knowing, as opposed to being and doing, was a critical break.
    Prior to the appearance of self and standard consciousness, organisms had been perfecting a machine of life regulation, on whose shoulders consciousness came to be built. Before some of the premises of the concern could be known in the conscious mind, those premises were already present, and the machine of life regulation had evolved around them. The difference between life regulation before consciousness and after consciousness simply has to do with automation versus deliberation. Before consciousness, life regulation was entirely automated; after consciousness begins, life regulation retains its automation but gradually comes under the influence of self-oriented deliberations.
    Thus the foundations for the processes of consciousness are the unconscious processes in charge of life regulation—the blind dispositions that regulate metabolic functions and are housed in brain-stem nuclei and hypothalamus; the dispositions that deliver reward and punishment and promote drives, motivations, and emotions; and the mapping apparatus that manufactures images, in perception and recall, and that can select and edit such images in the movie known as mind. Consciousness is just a latecomer to life management, but it moves the whole game up a notch. Smartly, it keeps the old tricks in place and lets them do the journeymen jobs.
The Freudian Unconscious
     
    Freud’s most interesting contribution to consciousness comes from his very last paper, written in the second half of 1938 and left incomplete at the time of his death. 7 I read this paper only recently, prompted by an invitation to give a lecture on the topic of Freud and neuroscience. It is the sort of assignment one should decline vigorously, but I was tempted and accepted. I then spent weeks reviewing Freud’s papers, alternating between irritation and admiration, as always happens when I read Freud. At the end of the toil came this final piece, which Freud wrote in London and in English, and where he adopts the only position on the matter of consciousness that I find plausible. Mind is a most natural result of evolution, and it is largely nonconscious, internal, and unrevealed. It comes to be known thanks to the narrow window of consciousness. This is precisely how I see it. Consciousness offers a direct experience of mind, but the broker of the experience is a self, which is an internal and imperfectly constructed informer rather than an external, reliable observer. The brain-ness of mind cannot be directly appreciated either by the natural internal observer or by the external scientist. The brain-ness of mind has to be imagined in the fourth perspective. Hypotheses have to be formulated on the basis of that imaginary view. Predictions have to be made on the basis of the hypotheses. A research program is needed to get closer to them.
    Although Freud’s view of the unconscious was dominated by sex, he was aware of the immense scope and power of mind processes going on under the sea level of consciousness. He was not alone, by the way, as the notion of unconscious processing was quite popular in psychological thinking of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nor was Freud alone in his foray into sex, whose science was also being explored at the time. 8
    Freud certainly seized on a wellspring of evidence for the unconscious when he concentrated on dreams. This move served his purposes quite well, as it provided him with material for his studies. This same wellspring has also been tapped by artists, composers, writers, and all manner of creators attempting to free themselves from the trammels of consciousness in search of novel images. A most interesting tension is at play here: very conscious creators consciously seek the unconscious as a source and, on occasion, as a method for their conscious endeavors. This in no way contradicts the idea that creativity could not have begun, let alone flourished, in the absence of consciousness. It just underscores how remarkably hybrid and flexible our mental lives are.
    The reasoning of dreams is relaxed, to say the least, in the good dreams as well as in the nightmares, and while causality may be respected, the imagination goes wild and reality be damned. Dreams do offer, however, direct evidence of mind processes unassisted by consciousness. The depth of unconscious processing tapped by dreams is considerable. For those who may be