Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Damasio Antonio

Author:Damasio, Antonio [Damasio, Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2010-11-08T23:00:00+00:00

8

Building a Conscious Mind

A Working Hypothesis

It goes without saying that the construction of a conscious mind is a very complex process, the result of additions and deletions of brain mechanisms over millions of years of biological evolution. No single device or mechanism can account for the complexity of the conscious mind. The different parts of the consciousness puzzle have to be treated separately and given their due before we can attempt a comprehensive account.

Still, it is helpful to start with a general hypothesis. The hypothesis comes in two parts. The first specifies that the brain constructs consciousness by generating a self process within an awake mind. The essence of the self is a focusing of the mind on the material organism that it inhabits. Wakefulness and mind are indispensable components of consciousness, but the self is the distinctive element.

The second part of the hypothesis proposes that the self is built in stages. The simplest stage emerges from the part of the brain that stands for the organism (the protoself) and consists of a gathering of images that describe relatively stable aspects of the body and generate spontaneous feelings of the living body (primordial feelings). The second stage results from establishing a relationship between the organism (as represented by the protoself) and any part of the brain that represents an object-to-be-known. The result is the core self. The third stage allows multiple objects, previously recorded as lived experience or as anticipated future, to interact with the protoself and produce an abundance of core self pulses. The result is the autobiographical self. All three stages are constructed in separate but coordinated brain workspaces. These are the image spaces, the playground for the influence of both ongoing perception and of dispositions contained in convergence-divergence regions.

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