- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
memory and autobiographical memory to give rise to our autobiographical self.
Damasio is clear that this self is not any kind of separate entity but is the you
that is born as the story of your life is told. As he puts it, ‘You are the music while
the music lasts’; ‘the owner of the movie-in-the-brain emerges within the movie’
(1999, pp. 191, 313). His theory entails not only a movie-in-the-brain (Chapter 5)
but the idea that neural patterns ‘are displayed in the appropriate areas of the
brain stem, thalamus, and cerebral cortex’ to generate the feelings (p. 73). Yet
Damasio insists that there is no need for a homunculus to watch the display. It is
‘watched’ by other brain processes. Take the example of burning your hand on a
hot plate. Your body can be in a state of pain because of the neural patterns and
nociceptive signals, but for you to experience the pain requires something more.
Specifically, ‘a process that interrelates neural patterns of tissue damage with the
neural patterns that stand for you, such that yet another neural pattern can arise –
the neural pattern of you knowing, which is just another name for consciousness’
(p. 73). But there is no explanation of how the display accounts for subjectivity or
how ‘neural patterns that stand for you’ can be consciousness.
According to Bernard Baars’s GWT, the self-system is part of the context hierarchy
that influences what gets onto the stage. Indeed, it is the dominant and unifying
‘deep context’. Baars uses James’s distinction between the ‘me’ and the ‘I’, distin-
guishing the self-concept (including values and beliefs about oneself ) from the
more fundamental self-system (including self as observer and self as agent). This
self-system is fundamental because ‘Consciousness inherently needs to interact
with a self-system, at least if its information is to be reportable and usable’ (1988,
p. 344). In this way, self and consciousness stand in the relationship of context to
content: self ‘is knowledge that provides the framework for all conscious experi-
ence [. . .], an overarching context for the flow of conscious events’ (p. 327).
In a later publication, Baars draws on Gazzaniga’s idea of the interpreter and
concludes that ‘full consciousness may not exist without the participation of [. . .]
prefrontal self systems’ (2005a, p. 50). But because consciousness integrates all
the brain’s functions, information cannot be accessed by the ‘observing self ’ (the
executive interpreters in parietal and prefrontal cortex) without consciousness (p.
47). So Baars seems to be saying that on the one hand, the self may provide the
context within which consciousness can exist, but that on the other hand, the self
may depend on consciousness to be able to play any functional role at all.
Applying his method of contrastive analysis, Baars considers experiences in which
the sense of the self is disrupted or abnormal, including fugue and multiple per-
sonality, as well as depersonalisation, a fairly common syndrome in which people
feel themselves to be unreal or mechanical or not themselves and experience
distortions of their body image. All of these self-alien phenomena, Baars notes,
are precipitated by events that disrupt the stable dominant context, as his model
predicts, and are associated with loss of autobiographical memory, as one would
also expect from a loss of stability in the context. Also, the disruption may happen
quickly, but recovery is slow because it means rebuilding the whole context.
In dissociative conditions such as fugue and multiple personality, different selves
alternate because different context hierarchies vie for access to the GW. This means
access to the senses and to autobiographical memory, and is required for any report-
able conscious experience. Because there is only one GW, this seems to preclude the
possibility (accepted by James, Prince, and others) of simultaneous consciousnesses.
Self is ‘knowledge that
provides the context for
all conscious experience’
(Baars, 1988, p. 327)