This article is based on a review of Antonio Damasio’s book, “The Feeling of What Happens”, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1999, by Thomas Metzinger in Scientific American, November 1999, pp. 125-6.
Core consciousness is the experience of the here and now; it is independent of language, reasoning, and memory. It is stable through a life time.
Extended consciousness adds to it past experiences (memory) and anticipation (imagination). It is thus an evolving personal history (biography), slowly changing.
Related to these are the following: Core self-consciousness is the core self which observes and tries to influence the experience of the here and now. It is the observer and manipulator of “the movie in the brain”.
Extended self-consciousness is the (deliberate or unconscious) writing of one’s autobiography, with possible embellishments (confabulations), even false memories.
“The movie in the brain” is studied in phenomenology. At some time in a baby’s life, the movie is clarified as the movements, colours, and shapes of objects. A little later, the owner and observer of the movie emerges as “the self”, which then persists through a life-time, and adds memory and anticipation as features of the autobiography. But both the objects and the self are to some extent illusions. Basic biology constructs the biography.
The presence of the self transforms mere wakefulness (vague awareness of sense perceptions and muscle movements) into true consciousness (presence of observer and mover). Then the self itself can be observed by the self (introspection) .
Emotions always accompany sense perceptions and muscle movements. Emotions (feelings) are bio-regulatory devices for survival. There is an unconscious proto-self defending its existence. It is body-based.
We know some of the corresponding brain structures. The cingulate cortex is the seat of attention, emotion, and generation of voluntary movement. Damage to this site disrupts core and extended consciousness while preserving wakefulness and reasoning power. Such a patient can figure out why it would be advantageous to perform a certain action, but fails to act because no emotion is driving him. The upper brain stem is the site of the unconscious proto-self (sometimes called the reptilian brain), and the hypothalamus is the site of ,the core self (the seat of emotion, the midbrain or mammalian brain). If these structures are damaged, there is a loss of wakefulness – presumably some type of coma. Presumably the brain remains active as a controller of hormones, and so the patient is still alive.
The organism is fundamentally situated in the movie in its own brain, seamlessly immersed in a biologically grounded virtual reality, and simultaneously having an “out of the brain” experience.
Animal minds may be at various other levels, but may also have abilities about which we know nothing.
Comparison of Damasio and Cairns-Smith
(Antonio Damasio, “The Feeling of What Happens”, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1999, and A.G. Cairns-smith, “Secrets of the Mind”, Springer Verlag, New York, 1999.) The two authors use different terms for what seem to be the same entities. This is set out in the diagram below.
| Damasio | Cairns-Smith |
|---|---|
| Proto-self (body-based) | Greater Self (unconscious) |
| Core (Self) Consciousness | Evanescent Self |
| Extended (Self) Consciousness |
The difference between the two schemes (besides the greater elaboration of the Damasio scheme) is a difference in emphasis and evaluation. For Damasio, the body-based proto-self is more primitive than what follows consciously; for Cairn-Smith, the unconscious Greater Self does most of the work of perception and volition, and is more skilled, faster, and more intelligent~than the conscious mind. (This latter view is also similar to Steven Pinker’s view in “How the Mind Works.”
In any case, since we do not have access to our own unconscious, introspection will not work as a method for exploring the mind. It will be difficult to build the fifth branch of knowledge as I outlined in my windmill model of the sciences. And yet, while we do not have access to direct observation of the interior of the Earth, we can infer a lot from observations on top of the crust where we sit.
Direct experience in deep meditation? That gives us insight into another “plug” in the “mind as a three-way plug” (an earlier essay), but not into the body-based unconscious.