Self Comes to Mind

perspective of the mind relative to the rest of the world. I am not talking here about the biological singularity provided by the protoself. I am referring to an effect we all experience in our minds: having a standpoint for whatever is happening outside the mind. This is not a mere “point of view,” although for the sighted majority of human beings, the view does dominate the proceedings of our mind, more often than not. But we also have a standpoint relative to the sounds out in the world, a standpoint relative to the objects we touch, and even a standpoint for the objects we feel in our own body—again, the elbow and its pain, or our feet as we walk on the sand.
    We do not mistakenly think we see with our belly buttons or hear with our armpits (intriguing as these possibilities might be). The sensory portals near which the data for making images are collected provide the mind with the standpoint of the organism relative to an object. The standpoint is drawn from the collection of body regions around which perceptions arise. That standpoint is broken only in abnormal conditions (out-of-body experiences), which can result from brain disease, psychological trauma, or experimental manipulations using virtual reality devices. 8
    I envision organism perspective as grounded in a variety of sources. Sight, sound, spatial balance, taste, and smell all depend on sensory portals not far from one another, all located in the head. We can think of the head as a multidimensional surveillance device, ready to take in the world. Touch, in its all-overness, has a broader sensory portal, but perspective related to touch still points unequivocally to the singular organism as the surveyor, and it identifies a place on the surveyor’s surface. The same all-overness obtains for the perception of our own movement, which does relate to the entire body but always originates with the singular organism.
    As far as the cerebral cortex is concerned, most of the sensory portal data must land in the somatosensory system—with SI and SII favored over the insula. In the case of vision, sensory portal data are also conveyed to the so-called frontal eye fields, which are located in Brodmann’s area 8, in the superior and lateral aspects of the frontal cortex. Once again these geographically separate brain regions need to be brought together functionally by some sort of integrating mechanism.
    One last note is in order regarding the exceptional situation of somatosensory cortices. These cortices convey signals from the external world, touch maps being the prime example, and from the body, as in the case of interoception, and the sensory portals. The sensory portal component rightfully belongs to organism structure and thus to the protoself.
    There is a remarkable contrast between two distinct sets of patterns, then. On the one hand, there is the infinite variety of patterns describing conventional objects (some of which are external to the body, such as sights and sounds, tastes and odors; some of which are actual body parts, such as joints or patches of skin). On the other hand, there is the infinite sameness of the narrow range of patterns related to the body’s interior and its tightly controlled regulation. There is an inescapable and fundamental difference between the strictly controlled aspect of the life process present inside our organisms and all the imaginable things and events out in the world or in the rest of the body. This difference is indispensable to understanding the biological foundation of the self processes.
    This same contrast between variety and sameness also holds at the level of the sensory portals. The changes that the sensory portals undergo from their basal state to the state associated with looking and seeing do not have to be extensive, although they can be. The changes simply have to signify that an engagement of organism and object has taken place. They do not have to convey anything about the object being engaged.
    In brief, the combination of the internal milieu, the visceral structure, and the basal state of the externally directed sensory portals provides an island of stability within a sea of motion. It preserves a relative coherence of functional state within a surround of dynamic processes whose variations are quite pronounced. Picture a large crowd marching along a street; a small group in the middle of the crowd is moving in steady and cohesive formation, while the rest of the crowd is darting loosely,