Minds emerge when the activity of small circuits is organized across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns. The patterns represent things and events located outside the brain, either in the body or in the external world, but some patterns also represent the brain’s own processing of other patterns. The term map applies to all those representational patterns, some of which are coarse, while others are very refined, some concrete, others abstract. In brief, the brain maps the world around it and maps its own doings. Those maps are experienced as images in our minds, and the term image refers not just to the visual kind but to images of any sense origin such as auditory, visceral, tactile, and so forth.
The coordination on which conscious minds depend is achieved by a variety of means. At the modest core level, it begins quietly, as a spontaneous assembly of images that emerge one after the other in close time proximity, the image of an object, on the one hand, and the image of the protoself changed by the object, on the other. No additional brain structures are needed for a core self to emerge, at this simple level. The coordination is natural, sometimes resembling a mere musical duo, played by organism and object, sometimes resembling a chamber music ensemble, and in both cases managing quite well without a conductor. But when the contents being processed in the mind are more numerous, other devices are required to accomplish coordination. In that case a variety of brain regions below the level of the cerebral cortices and within them play a key role.
Building a mind capable of encompassing one’s lived past and anticipated future, along with the lives of others added to the fabric and a capacity for reflection to boot, resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel, as hinted at earlier, is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds. The coordinators are not mythical, sapient homunculi in charge of interpreting anything. And yet the coordinators do help with the assembly of an extraordinary media universe and with the placement of a protagonist in its midst.
The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions of the brain stem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider-than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of cerebral cortex and subcortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, in ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anes-thesia, brain dysfunction, or death. No single mechanism explains consciousness in the brain, no single device, no single region, or feature, or trick, any more than a symphony can be played by one musician or even a few. Many are needed. What each of them contributes does count. But only the ensemble produces the result we seek to explain.
Managing and safekeeping life efficiently are two of the recognizable achievements of consciousness: neurological patients whose consciousness is compromised are unable to manage their lives independently even when their basic life functions operate normally. And yet mechanisms for managing and maintaining life are not a novelty in biological evolution and are not necessarily dependent on consciousness. Such mechanisms already exist in single cells and are coded in their genome.
They are also widely replicated within ancient, humble, un-minded and unconscious neuron circuits, and they are very much present deep in human brains. We shall see that managing and safekeeping life is the fundamental premise of biological value. Biological value has influenced the evolution of brain structures, and in any brain it influences almost every step of brain operations. It is expressed as simply as in the release of chemical molecules related to reward and punishment, or as elaborately as in our social emotions and in sophisticated reasoning.
Biological value naturally guides and colors, so to speak, almost everything that happens inside our very minded, very conscious brains. Biological value has the status of a principle.
The march of mind progress does not end with the arrival of the modest levels of self. Throughout the evolution of mammals, especially pri-mates, minds become ever more complex, memory and reasoning expanding notably, and the self processes enlarge their scope. The core self remains, but it is gradually surrounded by an autobiographical self, whose neural and mental natures are very different from those of the core self. We become able to use a part of our mind’s operation to monitor the operation of other parts.
The conscious minds of humans, armed with such complex selves and supported by even greater capabilities of memory, reasoning, and language, engender the instruments of culture and open the way into new means of homeostasis at the level of societies and culture. In an extraordinary leap, homeostasis acquires an extension into the sociocultural space. Justice systems, economic and political organizations, the arts, medicine, and technology are examples of the new devices of regulation.
The dramatic reduction of violence along with the increase in tolerance that has become so apparent in recent centuries would not have occurred without sociocultural homeostasis. Neither would the gradual transition from coercive power to the power of persuasion that hallmarks advanced social and political systems, their failures notwithstanding. The investigation of sociocultural homeostasis can be informed by psychology and neuroscience, but the native space of its phenomena is cultural.
Both basic homeostasis (which is nonconsciously guided) and sociocultural homeostasis (which is created and guided by reflective conscious minds) operate as curators of biological value. Basic and sociocultural varieties of homeostasis are separated by billions of years of evolution, and yet they promote the same goal-the survival of living organisms-albeit in different ecological niches. That goal is broadened, in the case of sociocultural homeostasis, to encompass the deliberate seeking of well-being. It goes without saying that the way in which human brains manage life requires both varieties of homeostasis in continuous interaction. But while the basic variety of homeostasis is an established inheritance, provided by everyone’s genome, the sociocultural variety is a somewhat fragile work in progress, responsible for much of human drama, folly, and hope. The interaction between these two kinds of homeostasis is not confined to each individual.
Source : Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by António Damásio
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7766914-self-comes-to-mind
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