Self Comes to Mind

the Conscious Mind
     
    Among the self’s many levels, the most complex tend to obscure the view of the simpler ones, dominating our minds with an exuberant display of knowledge. But we can try to overcome the natural obfuscation and put all this complexity to a good use. How? By asking the complex levels of self to observe what is going on at the simpler ones. This is a difficult exercise and not without risks. Introspection, as we have seen, can provide misleading information. But the risk is well worth taking, given that introspection offers the only direct view of what we wish to explain. Besides, if the information we gather leads to flawed hypotheses, then future empirical testing will reveal them to be so. On an intriguing note, engaging in introspection turns out to be a translation, within the mind, of a process that complex brains have been engaged in for a long time in evolution: talking to themselves, both literally and in the language of neuron activity.
    Let us look, then, inside our conscious minds and try to observe what the mind is like, at the bottom of its richly layered textures, stripped of the baggage of identity, lived past, and anticipated future, the conscious mind of the moment and in the moment. I cannot speak for everyone, of course, but here is what my reconnaissance tells me. To begin with, down at the bottom, the simple conscious mind is not unlike what William James described as a flowing stream with objects in it. But the objects in the stream are not equally salient. Some are as if magnified, others not. Nor are the objects arranged equally relative to me. Some are placed in a certain perspective relative to a material me that, a good part of the time, I can even localize not just to my body but, more precisely, to a bit of space behind my eyes and between my ears. Just as notably, some objects, though not all, are accompanied by a feeling that connects them unequivocally with my body and mind. The feeling tells me, without a word being spoken, that I own the objects, for the duration, and that I can act on them if I wish to do so. This is, literally, “the feeling of what happens,” the object-related feeling about which I have written in the past. On the matter of feelings in the mind, however, I have this to add: the feeling of what happens is not the whole story . There is some deeper feeling to be guessed and then found in the depths of the conscious mind. It is the feeling that my own body exists, and it is present, independently of any object with which it interacts, as a rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive. This fundamental feeling, which I had not deemed necessary to note in earlier approaches to this problem, I now introduce as a critical element of the self process. I call it primordial feeling , and I note that it has a definite quality , a valence , somewhere along the pleasure-to-pain range. It is the primitive behind all feelings of emotion and therefore is the basis of all feelings caused by interactions between objects and organism. As we shall see, primordial feelings are produced by the protoself. 3
    In brief, while plunging into the depths of the conscious mind, I discover that it is a composite of different images. One set of those images describes the objects in consciousness. Other images describe me , and the me includes: (1) the perspective in which the objects are being mapped (the fact that my mind has a standpoint of viewing, touching, hearing, and so on, and that the standpoint is my body); (2) the feeling that the objects are being represented in a mind belonging to me and to no one else (ownership); (3) the feeling that I have agency relative to the objects and that the actions being carried out by my body are commanded by my mind; and (4) primordial feelings , which signify the existence of my living body independently of how objects engage it or not.
    The aggregate of elements (1) through (4) constitutes a self in its simple version. When the images of the self aggregate are folded together with the images of nonself objects, the result is a conscious mind.
    All this knowledge is readily present. It is not arrived at by reasoned inference or interpretation. To begin with, it is not verbal either. It is made of hints and hunches, of feelings that occur relative to the living body and relative to an object .
    The simple self at the bottom of the mind is a lot like music but not yet poetry.
The Ingredients of a Conscious Mind
     
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