I don’t know where consciousness begins in the animal kingdom though most animals we pay attention to are certainly conscious in the intuitive sense of being aware of their immediate environment and not just responding to simple chemical cues. So far as I know, only human beings are self-aware in a deep sense so that it is truly a part of human nature. Chimpanzees can show self-awareness under certain circumstances but don’t seem to be at high levels of self-awareness as a natural matter. When I speak of a ‘human self’, I mean a human being in which this self-awareness is developed to a relatively high level. As I’ll discuss, we have little reason to believe that we come into this world with a well-developed self-awareness any more than we come into this world with well-developed intellectual skills.
In another entry, Can Corruption of Language Lead to Heresy, I spoke of the dangers to Christian belief of the modern understanding of person and I made reference to complex arguments that we can become persons, in the Christian sense, only by letting Christ infuse us and turn us into Christ-like human beings. It’s best to keep those arguments in mind when reading this entry.
In another prior entry, Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge, I spoke about an article in the newsletter “BrainWork” which discussed evidence that out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences seem to be the result of serious disruption of certain brain systems that regulate our awareness of ourselves as selves. There is a very interesting implication of the very existence of these brain systems, one which is more disturbing than the likelihood that there is no human soul separable from the body.
I’ll leave it to the interested reader to explore the scientific literature if he cares much about the details of these brain systems. Neuroscience is blessed with some top-level scientists who can books which are accessible to a literate non-expert. If you need a start, here are some names: Michael Gazzaniga, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, Semir Zeki, William Calvin, and Antonio Damasio.
Those who doubt the tentative and fragile nature of our self-hood can think about any human beings they knew who suffered from Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s. Amongst the other problems in such disorders, we can observe a frightening loss of self-hood even when the victims are quite recognizable in their behavior and speech as human beings, although they’ll be limited in both those areas by the time that loss becomes noticeable.
The human self truly is a construction resulting from interactions of the physical human being with the environments around it and also from internal interactions of various components of that body. The brain is very important but other components and aspects of the human being are involved.
‘Construction’ is a bad word for the development of one of the most complex aspects of the human organism, but it makes the point. It’s a little better to say that we’re not characters passing through the stories that are our lives — we’re formed by those stories even as we shape those stories by our own actions and thoughts, including our imaginative interpretations by which we struggle to see the moral meanings of those stories which are our lives, stories which are part of the great story God is telling, the story which is the world. We don’t come into this world as pre-formed characters; our genetic and somatic heritage provide important possibilities and constraints but there is a lot of room for variation. Identical twins might be very alike but they are far from being just two copies of the same being. Each of those twins has had somewhat different experiences, inside his body and outside, even when they were closely bonded.
There is no self which is magically attached to a body, no self which exists at the moment of birth or even at the age of 50, let alone at the moment of conception. Saul of Tarsus was not an autonomous agent as in modern liberal theories of politics and economics; the change to Paul was different from a mere selection of a different basket of life-style goods and choices. The change was deep inside of his very being.
A human being, at 70 as well as at birth, has a very complex body which provides some basic processes and some very complex processes by which a self can be shaped. Many of those processes don’t work in isolation but only in response to environmental cues, including those from the mother and other human beings. We’re constrained by our bodies and our environments but we’re shaped within those constraints by our particular responses to the world and by the response of others to us.
Perhaps it’s best, in the sense of accuracy, to regard most human beings as being immature selves with a low-level of self-awareness. This might partially explain the difficulty that most human beings seem to have in taking moral responsibility for, or even interest in, the large organizations and general movements of which they’re part. Too easily, human beings merge into a herd of human animals responding to material needs or to the general movment of the herd. We need more self-awareness before we can be unselfish at the larger scale. We at least need to recognize that we are part of a herd, or several herds at different times of our day or our lives. Otherwise, we will simply act, with blinders on, to take care of our mortgages and our retirement funds, because that’s what the modern herd considers to be the highest duties. Self-awareness would seem to be necessary for higher moral consciousness, but it doesn’t seem to be inborn. The possibility is inborn but modern ways of living, modern ways of forming societies and educating our children, don’t seem to develop the sort of self-awareness necessary to that higher moral consciousness.