Self Comes to Mind

in Brownian motion, some elements dragging behind the others, some overtaking the core group, and so forth.
    One other element must to be added to the scaffolding provided by the internal milieu’s relative invariance: the fact that the body proper remains inseparably attached to the brain at all times. This attachment underlies the generation of primordial feelings and the unique relationship between the body, as object, and the brain that represents that object. When we make maps of objects and events out in the world, those objects and events remain out in the world. When we map our body’s objects and events, they are inside the organism and they do not go anywhere. They act on the brain but can be acted upon at any time, forming a resonating loop that achieves something akin to a body-mind fusion. They constitute an animated substrate that provides an obligate context for all other contents of the mind. The protoself is not a mere collection of maps of the body comparable to the nice collection of pictures of abstract expressionist paintings that I carry in my brain. The protoself is a collection of maps that remains connected interactively with its source, a deep root that cannot be alienated. Alas, the pictures of favorite abstract expressionist paintings that I carry in my brain do not connect physically at all with their sources. I wish they did, but they are only in my brain.
    Finally, I should note that the protoself is not to be confused with a homunculus, just as the self that results from its modification is not homuncular. The traditional notion of homunculus corresponds to a little person sitting inside the brain, all knowing and all wise, capable of answering questions about what is going on in the mind and providing interpretations for the goings-on. The well-identified problem with the homunculus resides with the infinite regress it creates. The little person whose knowledge would render us conscious needs to have yet another little person in its inside, capable of providing it with the necessary knowledge, and so forth ad infinitum. This does not work. The knowledge that renders our minds conscious must be constructed from the bottom up. Nothing could be farther from the notion of protoself presented here than the idea of homunculus. The protoself is a reasonably stable platform and thus a source of continuity. We use the platform to inscribe the changes caused by having an organism interact with its surround (as when one looks at and grasps an object) or to inscribe the modification of organism structure or state (as when one suffers a wound or lowers the level of blood sugar excessively). The changes are registered against the current state of the protoself , and the perturbation triggers subsequent physiological events, but the protoself does not contain any information aside from that contained in its maps. The protoself is not a sage sitting at Delphi answering questions about who we are.
Constructing the Core Self
     
    In thinking about a strategy to construct the self, it is appropriate to start with the requirements for the core self. The brain needs to introduce into the mind something that was not present before, namely, a protagonist. Once a protagonist is available in the midst of other mind contents, and once that protagonist is coherently linked to some of the current mind contents, subjectivity begins to inhere in the process. We need to concentrate first on the protagonist’s threshold, the point at which the indispensable elements of knowledge agglutinate, so to speak, to yield subjectivity.
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    Once we have a unified island of relative stability corresponding to a part of the organism, might the self emerge from it in one fell swoop? If so, the anatomy and physiology of the brain regions that underlie the protoself would tell most of the story of how a self is made. The self would derive from the brain’s capacity to accumulate and integrate knowledge about the most stable aspects of the organism, case closed. The self would amount to the unadorned and felt representation of life within the brain, a sheer experience unconnected to anything but its own body. The self would consist of the primordial feeling that the protoself, in its native state, spontaneously and relentlessly delivers, instant after instant.
    When it comes to the complex mental lives that both you and I are experiencing at this very moment, however, protoself and primordial feeling are not enough to account