According to supernatural conceptions of the self, we’re not
identical with the brain since we consist of a spiritual, immaterial and thus
seemingly immortal substance. That substance portends an apocalyptic end of all
of nature by a hidden, transcendent reality that’s thought of as the abode of
the universe’s personal creator. The modern word for “spirit” is “consciousness,”
since consciousness, too, seems like a ghostly presence, an invisible essence within the head. According to the science-centered view, though, the self is a congeries
of programs computed somehow by the embodied nervous system; at any rate, the
self is a natural thing or process, operating under physical laws. The opposition
between these two conceptions sets up either the personal self or the natural
body to be interpreted as an illusion subordinated to the other’s corresponding
ontology.
But all of this is oversimplified. There clearly is a
materialistic, animalistic, embodied self just as clearly as there is a
subjective, personal, and thus potentially noble or transcendent thing as mind.
The Self’s Origin in Higher-Order Thought
Here’s how I see mind arising from mechanisms operating in
the body. The brain evolved as a hodgepodge of modules, which are independent,
specialized subsystems that carry out specific functions. Most animals receive
inputs from one or another module and their training takes over, automating
their behaviour. This is to say that they lack personhood, which is the
awareness of being a self that processes perceptual inputs and can freely
decide how to respond. Our species adapted to life after the eons in which
dinosaurian might made right, by developing a capacity for high intelligence
that’s generated by the cerebral cortex. Our Mesolithic and Paleolithic
ancestors found themselves able to categorize phenomena to a high level of
abstraction and to systematize their communications using the technology of
linguistic symbols and rules. Instead of reacting automatically to stimuli,
they could reflect and prepare their response, learning the most efficient
techniques and preserving that information for future generations.
Consciousness arose as
a special kind of higher-order thought. Picture a primate flooded with
information from its environment which it could now customize by categories and
access at will, thanks to its cerebral cortex which acts as a brain within a brain, detaching the
emotion and motor centers from the environmental cues so that the primate’s
behaviour needn’t be slaved to genetic programming. The primate could always investigate
the outer world with its paws and outer senses, but now it could also organize the
flood of data within its head. In
short, it could think about its thoughts. For example, the primate could think
roughly, “This pain feels bad, but it would be best not to wince, to avoid
looking like a weakling.” Instead of being concerned just with modifying its
outer environment, the sapient primate learned how to develop its cognitive
capacities. It did so by rational
detachment and by linguistic
abstraction, which allowed for higher-order thoughts, which in turn enable
the species to thrive and thus to continue to practice thinking in its free
time.
But what is the self
that is accomplishing these cognitive feats? There was no otherworldly monolith
that intervened in the Stone Age and miraculously transformed animals into
people, as in Kubrick’s film 2001.
Instead, I think we should picture those
early intelligent primates as being terrified
of their cognitive powers and as inventing the self to manage that fear.
Specifically, as their reasoning center gradually disentangled itself from the
older neural subsystems, with the advent of their brain within the brain, and as
those forerunners became more sophisticated in managing their thoughts, they
would still have been exposed to fear of
that enclosed inner space.
