The Evolution of Consciousness: Mind and Self Explored

We all have free access to consciousness, bubbling so easily and abundantly in our minds that without hesitation or apprehension we let it be turned off every night when we go to sleep and allow it to return every morning when the alarm clock rings, at least 3o times a year, not counting naps. And yet few things about our beings are as remarkable, foundational, and seemingly mysterious as consciousness.

Without consciousness— that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity— you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think. Had subjectivity not begun, even if very modestly at first, in living creatures far simpler than we are, memory and reasoning are not likely to have expanded in the prodigious way they did, and the evolutionary road for language and the elaborate human version of consciousness we now possess would not have been paved. Creativity would not have flourished. There would have been no song, no painting, and no literature. Love would never have been love, just sex.

Friendship would have been mere cooperative convenience. Pain would never have become suffering— not a bad thing, come to think of it— but an equivocal advantage given that pleasure would not have become bliss either. Had subjectivity not made its radical appearance, there would have been no knowing and no one to take notice, and consequently there would have been no history of what creatures did through the ages, no culture at all.

There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious. We can consider the self process from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a dynamic object—the dynamic object constituted by certain workings of minds, certain traits of behavior, and a certain history of life. The other vantage point is that of the self as knower, the process that gives a focus to our experiences and eventually lets us reflect on those experiences.

Combining the two vantage points produces the dual notion of self used throughout the book. As we shall see, the two notions correspond to two stages of evolutionary development of the self, the self-as-knower having had its origin in the self-as-object. In everyday life each notion corresponds to a level of operation of the conscious mind, the self-as-object being simpler in scope than the self-as-knower.

Countless creatures for millions of years have had active minds, but only in those who developed a self capable of operating as a witness to the mind was its existence acknowledged, and only after minds developed language and lived to tell did it become widely known that minds did exist. The self as witness is the something extra that reveals the pres-ence, in each of us, of events we call mental. We need to understand how that something extra is created.

The notions of witness and protagonist are not meant as mere literary metaphors. For one thing, the metaphors can help us see the situation we face when we attempt to understand mental processes. A mind unwitnessed by a self protagonist is still a mind. However, given that the self is our only natural means to know the mind, we are entirely dependent on the self’s presence, capabilities, and limits. And given this systematic dependence, it is extremely difficult to imagine the nature of the mind process independently of the self, although from an evolutionary perspective, it is apparent that plain mind processes preceded self processes.

The self permits a view of the mind, but the view is clouded. The aspects of the self that permit us to formulate interpretations about our existence and about the world are still evolving, certainly at the cultural level and, in all likelihood, at the biological level as well. For instance, the upper reaches of self are still being modified by all manner of social and cultural interactions and by the accrual of scientific knowledge about the very workings of mind and brain. One entire century of movie viewing has certainly had an impact on the human self, as has the spectacle of globalized societies now instantly broadcast by electronic media. As for the impact of the digital revolution, it is just beginning to be appreciated. In brief, our only direct view of the mind depends on a part of that very mind, a self process that we have good reason to believe cannot provide a comprehensive and reliable account of what is going on.

Viewing the mind as a non physical phenomenon, discontinuous with the biology that creates and sustains it, is responsible for placing the mind outside the laws of physics, a discrimination to which other brain phenomena are not usually subject. The most striking manifestation of this oddity is the attempt to connect the conscious mind to heretofore undescribed properties of matter and, for example, explain consciousness in terms of quantic phenomena. The rationale for this idea appears to be as follows: the conscious mind seems mysterious; because quantum physics remains mysterious, perhaps the two mysteries are connected.

Given our incomplete knowledge of both biology and physics, one should be cautious before dismissing alternative accounts. After all, in spite of neurobiology’s remarkable success, our understanding of the human brain is quite incomplete. Nonetheless, the possibility of explaining mind and consciousness parsimoniously, within the confines of neurobiology as currently conceived, remains open; it should not be abandoned unless the technical and theoretical resources of neurobiology are exhausted, an unlikely prospect at the moment.

It requires us to note incremental modifications of nervous systems and link them to the incremental emergence of, respectively, behavior, mind, and self. It also requires an internal working hypothesis: that mental events are equivalent to certain kinds of brain events. Of course, mental activity is caused by the brain events that antecede it, but at the end of the day, the mental events correspond to certain states of brain circuits. In other words, some neural patterns are simultaneously mental images. When some other neural patterns generate a rich enough self process subject, the images can become known. But if no self is generated, the images still are, although no one, inside or outside the organism, knows of their existence. Subjectivity is not required for mental states to exist, only for them to be privately known.

Source : Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by António Damásio

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7766914-self-comes-to-mind