Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

by António Damásio

But in fact they do, and, as we shall see, the notion of value is central to our understanding of brain evolution, brain development, and actual, moment-to-moment brain activity.

Crudely stated, the paramount value for whole organisms consists of healthy survival to an age compatible with reproductive success. Natural selection has perfected the machinery of homeostasis to permit precisely that. Accordingly, the physiological state of a living organism’s tissues, within an optimal homeostatic range, is the deepest origin of biological value and valuations.

Biological value moves up or down a scale relative to the life-effectiveness of the physical state. In a way, biological value is a surrogate of physiological efficiency.

The values that humans attribute to objects and activities would bear some relation, no matter how indirect or remote, to the two following conditions: first, the general maintenance of living tissue within the homeostatic range suitable to its current context; second, the particular regulation required for the process to operate within the sector of the homeostatic range associated with well-being relative to the current context.

In brief, the minimal features that such simple organisms had to have so that they could succeed and let their genes travel on to the next generation were sensing of the organism’s interior and exterior, a response policy, and movement.

Brains evolved as devices that could improve the business of sensing, deciding, and moving and run it in more and more effective and differentiated manner.

Art may have begun as a homeostatic device for artist and recipient and as a means of communication. Eventually on the side of the artist and on the side of the audience, the uses became quite varied. Art became a privileged means to transact factual and emotional information deemed to be important for individuals and society, something established in early epic poems, theater, and sculpture. Art also became a means to induce nourishing emotions and feelings, something at which music has excelled through the ages. No less important, art became a way to explore one’s own mind and the minds of others, a means to rehearse specific aspects of life, and a means to exercise moral judgment and moral action. Ultimately, because the arts have deep roots in biology and the human body but can elevate humans to the greatest heights of thought and feeling, they became a way into the homeostatic refinement that humans eventually idealized and longed to achieve, the biological counterpart of a spiritual dimension in human affairs.

In brief, the arts prevailed in evolution because they had survival value and contributed to the development of the notion of well-being. They helped cement social groups and promote social organization; they assisted with communication; they compensated for emotional imbalances caused by fear, anger, desire, and grief; and they probably inaugurated the long process of establishing external records of cultural life,

The arts were an inadequate compensation for human suffering, for unattained happiness, for lost innocence, but they were and are compensation nonetheless, an offset to natural calamities and to the evil that men do. They are one of the remarkable gifts of consciousness to humans.

Memory, tempered by personal feeling, is what allows humans to imagine both individual well-being and the compounded well-being of a whole society, and to invent the ways and means of achieving and magnifying that well-being.

Memory is responsible for ceaselessly placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities.

The future pulls us forward, from a distant vanishing point, and gives us the will to continue the voyage in the present. This may be what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote: “Time past and time future / What might have been and ...