Now I am returning to the issue of consciousness and the absence of self with which I began Part 1 of this post.  It is only my own view, and it isn’t original.  It is also entirely open to challenge by anybody who understands these matters better than I do - and there must be many.

It is usual in Western thought for the question of the self to be treated as an epistemological issue.  But what I am really setting out to do in this series is to recover from the sloppy psychological models of the past - all that couch-talk about the unconscious, the subconscious, the collective unconscious, and so on, for those workings of the mind which proceed in us quite without our assistance, and over which we presume sovereignty.  I’ll begin with a thumbnail sketch of the hardware, so to speak, of the mind.  Some observations about the much more interesting and altogether too, too fallible software will follow in the next post.

Neurologically, all sentient organisms have one or more systems which project the consciousness of self, insomuch as that hologrammatic thing can be said to exist.  These are not coterminous with the divisions in the human brain and nervous systems but, largely excepting thought it seems, are distributed across them.  They activate different areas of the brain.  They are separate from the visceral nervous system.  I contend that they have evolved out of the most nascent awareness of sexual division, selection and self-maintenance.  In other words, the survival strategy of sensing, to borrow the old German Idealist term, “the thing that is” beyond the organism itself is the only reason for human self-awareness and self-interest.

The “hardware”

In Man there have evolved not one but three systems for negotiating “the thing that is”, each distinguished by function, speed, content and language.  In a healthy organism these three systems should abstract good enough information from “the thing that is” for evolutionarily adaptive choices to be made.

The motor system, distributed across the nervous system and tied to the rear areas of the pre-frontal cortex, interprets the evidence of the senses and controls voluntary movement.  Its language is sensation.  It is the oldest of the three systems in evolutionary terms.  It operates at very high speed but shuts down completely in the sleep state.

There are two aspects to its functioning, both impressive but definitely figured in a lower/higher order.  The first is its capability to learn (for example, how to walk or speak, adapt certain postures, dance, write in copperplate) - and reproduce what it has learned all life long.  The second aspect, at which it is truly astonishing, is instantaneous predictive calculation (for example, how a ball is to be intercepted in flight and struck in a precise way, or how juggling pins are to be caught and thrown).

Neither of the other systems can undertake its specialisms, and where interference takes place the results are always negative, ie the footballer under intense psychological pressure who blasts his penalty kick high over the bar, or the drunk who tries to think his way into walking straight … and falls over.

The natural tendency of the motor system is towards habituation though, as we shall see, this is something of a common denominator in the workings of all three systems.

The second of them I would call the emotional system.  It uses the language of feeling in a continuous, reactive flow.  It is marginally slower in operation than the sensory/motor system - one begins to withdraw one’s hand from the coiled snake before fear floods in.  It surely evolved from the tendency of the organism to avoid physical pain.  It prioritises or discriminates for all forms of self-interest, and it does this by ascribing specific value to experience and behaviour.  Feeling is highly differentiated value ascription.

Again, there are two lower/higher ordered aspects to the system.  The most ancient functions of the emotional system are instinctual and hormonal.  They range, for example, from the crude hormonal determinants such as fight or flight to more complex emotions which illuminate adaptive and maladaptive life choices.  They are present in all mammals.  Man’s instinctual emotions are associated with the work of the amygdala and perhaps some other areas of the limbic system.  However, the higher, non-instinctual emotions, of which the most refined pertain to faith, conscience and altruism, are associated with the pre-frontal cortex.

The third and youngest system is the mentational system.  It may have evolved to its elevated state in Man through the accident of there being grasslands where there had been forest (that is, under the pressures that selected for Homo habilis).  It uses the language of words and the method of thought association to represent or construct a model of reality.  Again, it is never still.  The stream of association is continuous.  It is substantially domiciled in the two halves of the cerebrum.  Its speed is never more than ponderous.  Words are cumbersome and the construction of models of reality is complicated.  In operation, then, the system is by far the slowest of the three, so much so that almost all deliberative function is compromised by the speed with which the other two systems can snap-up every decision going.

Again, we can discern two aspects in a lower/higher order.  Non-creative thought is highly repetitive and confirmatory in nature.  It is good for organising facts, such as I am doing here, making comparisons, planning and designing.  Its higher analytical reaches take us into the processing of abstract thought.  Beyond that, however, lies the realm of true creative thought.  That deals in invention and pure reason, and may perhaps owe its arising to the fitness gain to be got from exploration.  Its operation is associated with the medial prefrontal cortex, and just now and again you will run into a bit of it here at MR!

So, forget everything you have ever been told by psychologists and psychoanalysts and other adherents to the religion of the Self.  These three cognitive systems - motor, emotional, mentational - are the ground on which the interior drama is played out.  Like the Yezidi who cannot escape from a chalk circle, we cannot break its bounds.  Its unceasing flow of thoughts, emotions, movements is all we have and contains the sum of our experience of “what it is to be human”.

Together with it goes the perfect capacity to invent a Self and the perfect confidence to “know” that the invention is real.  We are tenacious in this knowledge.  We can never relinquish it.  We will go on “knowing” even if we are shown that it is a story woven over the endless blizzard of brain activity, and nothing more.

It is nothing more.  Here’s the redoubtable realist Susan Blackmore trying to penetrate the carapace in her entry to the 2007 Edge Annual Question:

We humans can, and do, make up our own purposes, but ultimately the universe has none. All the wonderfully complex, and beautifully designed things we see around us were built by the same purposeless process — evolution by natural selection. This includes everything from microbes and elephants to skyscrapers and computers, and even our own inner selves.

People have (mostly) got used to the idea that living things were designed by natural selection, but they have more trouble accepting that human creativity is just the same process operating on memes instead of genes. It seems, they think, to take away uniqueness, individuality and “true creativity”.

Of course it does nothing of the kind; each person is unique even if that uniqueness is explained by their particular combination of genes, memes and environment, rather than by an inner conscious self who is the fount of creativity.

So our life is one of processes, not choices, and our sense of self - the personal world, the inner life that we know and which seems to be everything - is a process too, or at least a culmination of processes.

Is this so terrible to acknowledge?  To a racial nationalist politics it is not the fatal weakness that it is to a radical individualist one.  Certainly, you will say that we can’t sell the Libetian truth to the world at large: “hey buddy, you are an illusion created by your own brain!”  But we, at least, must not flee from Truth.  Besides, nationalism claims the redoubt of being and of Nature.  It claims that the European world as it has been shaped by forces hostile to the European being and European nature is a lie.  It is not our world, does not reflect us, does not grant us legitimacy or land or even life.  Liberalism, Jewish ethno-warfare, cultural Marxism, postmodernity … call it what you like, it is a world of surface meanings, a world of the lightweight, the rootless, the estranged.  It is the antithesis of what a truly European world should be.  And all this begins, ultimately, in the workings of the three systems, the conception we have of the self, and its openness to debasement and degradation.

But being and Nature can never be debased or degraded.  What flows from them you can rely on.  This is where an ontology of nationalism would stand - if it existed.  It would agree with liberalism in only one respect.  The sense of self, that magically convincing conflation of process and story-telling, is plastic and its utility can be improved (albeit not by the freeing of the conscious will, there being none).  At the level of race and ethny, if the genetic foundation obtains, it is always possible to redeem damaged psychological goods.  We all have ideas of how that might be done.

The next and final post will not explore those ideas, though.  It will, instead, explore the function and inherent problems of this sense of self, and how its dominant relationship to being might be better understood.