Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.
Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture – morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.
We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.
The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it’s the lived past and the anticipated future.
When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.
More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s – the so-called decade of the brain – than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.
How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
Scott Fitzgerald said famously that ‘he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for.’ But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.
A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind.
A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.
The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture – religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.
Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.
In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one’s own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.
Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.
In ‘Self Comes to Mind’ I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those ‘cartooned abstractions of who we are’ operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.