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By Root 4235 0

the mental qualities of memory and self recognition. For the ancients, the soul had many properties which are best explained by various neurological events. So the most interesting aspects of the soul adhere to its role in defining our interior lives, our consciousness. It is therefore worthwhile to digress for a moment more about the contemporary study of consciousness. Epistemology and the more recent search for an adequate description of and explanation of consciousness are such full and interesting fields of inquiry that even a survey would demand a whole book in itself.33 The next few paragraphs merely will be a description of the working definitions that I have adopted.

We now have good physiological evidence that there is no single organ in the brain that corresponds to consciousness. Thus, consciousness is not a single unified phenomenon with a single origin; rather, it is a unitary experience which we effortlessly and unconsciously synthesize from various capacities operating more or less independently in our brains. Consciousness includes perception, cognition, and memory, but also proprioception and a variety of other functions. When organs in the brain are damaged in strokes and injuries, we observe the selective effects on our conscious processes. We may lose the faculty of speech temporarily or permanently, for instance. These are easily correlated with observable damage to areas in the brain. So we now know experimentally what various areas in the brain contribute to consciousness.

We also have the ability to selectively hone consciousness and to perform other tasks without conscious intervention. Almost everyone has had the experience of driving home from work, lost in thought, without being conscious of the process of driving at all and without being able to remember a single moment of it without the utmost concentration. By observation of hypnotic states we also know that consciousness is not continuous but the “breaks” are not always like a “black out” or “blue screen” on a television broadcast. We have breaks in consciousness when we are not aware that we have missed something.

This suggests that consciousness is an emergent property, not inherent to any one organ but something that emerges from the harmonious operation of a series of processes. Because consciousness is emergent and complex, and because consciousness itself can be the subject of thought, we have a feeling that I will call “self-consciousness.” “Self-consciousness” is affected greatly by our cultural understandings of what our consciousness is. Buddhists may not only have different notions of selfhood than Christians; because of these differing religious definitions, their experience of self may well be different. That suggests that there cannot be a simple and single description of self-consciousness. Like RISC, it is partly a culturally mediated experience. The notion of the soul or the transformed body of apocalypticism really can and does effect how we understand ourselves.

It is not consciousness in itself which should be of interest to us right now. Many species of animals may be conscious. Anyone who has observed animals closely becomes convinced of it. But self-consciousness is a human, cultural phenomenon, though animals may have the rudiments of it. By experiment, we know that the higher apes are able to recognize themselves in a mirror, while dogs and cats and other animals usually show no recognition of the image as themselves. The most they can do is mistake their reflection for another animal.

Daniel Povinelli and John Cant speculate that the evolutionary explanation for our self-concept is that it is necessary to have a self-concept to swing through the trees with the kind of advanced skills which apes evince, making far more complicated judgments than, for instance, squirrels or bats do when they move through the canopy.34 One supposes that proprioception, this sense that we know where we are in space, develops into culturally mediated notions of whom we are and how our internal states define us as individuals.

So