Self Comes to Mind

and before presenting the several hypothetical mechanisms needed to carry out the general working hypothesis, let us say that, from an evolutionary standpoint, self processes began to occur only after minds and alertness were established as brain operations. Self processes were especially efficient at orienting and organizing minds toward the homeostatic needs of their organisms and thus increasing the chances of survival. Not surprisingly, self processes were naturally selected and prevailed in evolution. In early stages, the self processes probably did not generate consciousness in the full sense of the term and were confined to the protoself level. Later in evolution more complex levels of self—core self and beyond—began to generate subjectivity within the mind and to qualify for consciousness. Even later, ever more complex constructions were used to obtain and accumulate additional knowledge about individual organisms and about their environment. The knowledge was deposited in memories residing inside the brain, held in convergence-divergence regions and in memories that have been recorded externally, in the instruments of culture. Consciousness in the fullest sense of the term emerged after such knowledge was categorized, symbolized in varied forms (including recursive language), and manipulated by imagination and reason.
    Two additional qualifications are in order. First, distinct levels of processing—mind, conscious mind, and conscious mind capable of producing culture—emerged in sequence. That should not leave the impression, however, that when minds acquired selves, they stopped evolving as minds or that selves eventually stopped evolving. On the contrary, the evolutionary process continued (and continues), possibly enriched and accelerated by the pressures created by self-knowledge, and there is no end in sight. The ongoing digital revolution, the globalization of cultural information, and the coming of the age of empathy are pressures likely to lead to structural modifications of mind and self, by which I mean modifications of the very brain processes that shape the mind and self.
    Second, from this point forward in the book, we will approach the problem of building a conscious mind from the perspective of the human, although whenever possible and appropriate, reference will be made to other species.
Approaching the Conscious Brain
     
    The neuroscience of consciousness is often approached from the mind component rather than from the self. 1 Opting to approach consciousness via the self is not meant to diminish, let alone neglect, the complexity and scope of sheer minds. Giving pride of place to the self process, however, is in keeping with the perspective adopted at the outset, according to which the reason why conscious minds prevailed in evolution was the fact that consciousness optimized life regulation. The self in each conscious mind is the first representative of individual life-regulation mechanisms, the guardian and curator of biological value. To a considerable extent, the immense cognitive complexity that hallmarks the current conscious minds of humans is motivated and orchestrated by the self, as a proxy of value.
    Whatever one’s study preference may be regarding the triad of wakefulness, mind, and self, it is apparent that the mystery of consciousness does not reside with wakefulness. On the contrary, we have considerable knowledge about the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology behind the process of wakefulness. It is perhaps no coincidence that the history of research on brain and consciousness actually began with the matter of wakefulness. 2
    The mind is the second component in the consciousness triad, and regarding its neural basis we are not in the dark either. We have made some progress, as discussed in Chapter 3 , even if many questions remain. That leaves the third and central component of the triad, the self, whose approach is often postponed on the grounds that it is too complicated to tackle in the current stage of our knowledge. This chapter and the next are largely concerned with the self, and they outline mechanisms for generating it and inserting it into the awake mind. The goal is to identify the neural structures and the mechanisms that are possibly capable of producing self processes, ranging from the sort of simple self that orients behavior adaptively to the complex variety of self capable of knowing that its own organism exists and guiding life accordingly.
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