The Body, Its Emotions, the Self, and Consciousness

Abstract

This article proposes a means for better understanding the self and consciousness. Data indicate that the basic "emotional brain" continually computes potential survival risk against reward to rank consequent "emotion scores" for all sensory inputs. These scores compete to yield winner-takes-all outcomes that determine the choice of attention or action. This mechanism prevails regardless of whether the competing options gain their emotion scores through a rational or an intuitive pathway. There is no need to postulate any homunculus or inner self in control of such choice; indeed, our belief in a first-person self in overall control is wrong.The self is a passive construct arising from each individual's social development, where language acquisition vastly heightens communication and awareness not only outwardly, but also inwardly, as if to a controlling "inner I." However, when society comes to hold the maturing being accountable for his or her actions, the brain must respond, and it does so in the only way it can, by deeming that this passive, inner self-construct act as if it were the active self in charge. Consciousness emerges when the language-based output of the higher brain is referred for ownership to this artificial self-construct. Recently I was trying to explain to an intelligent woman the problem of trying to understand

Clinical judgement and the emotions

“…We therefore need to ask just what other mechanism might be in control of brain function, and, more specifically, if consciousness is so passive, how does the brain actually make its decisions? On reflection, I have gradually come to the somewhat strange conclusion that there is no better candidate for this than the risk/reward system that resides in ‘emotional brain’, and essentially within its subcortical mesolombic aspect . There, over the billions of years, evolution has produced an increasingly sophisticated and now highly refined mechanism to facilitate life survival decisions extremely well …”

“…This risk/reward system has been shown to put the incoming sensory information into a ‘common currency’, take into account the prevailing context and then give each datum a ‘relative subjective value’, so that it is poised ready for the process of ‘reward harvesting’ . The mechanism has now become highly sophisticated, quantitatively calculating not just potential risks and rewards, in what I have called ‘emotion scores’, but also evaluating the risk prediction errors from past experiences, from which it is continually learning through reinforcement feedback …”

“…With this as background, my additional suggestion has been that when multiple emotion‐score options present themselves over changing times and contexts, the risk/reward system acts as a ‘winner‐take‐all’ mechanism to compare and assess the available options and choose the one with the highest emotion score relevant to life survival in the prevailing setting . This then, I suggest, becomes the system's ‘output ‘decision’.…”

“…Well, I am not so sure. I have proposed that rationality does indeed get a look in but only when the individual's experience within society has given such rational options sufficiently high emotion scores to allow them to compete with other more intuitive alternatives …”

“…In essence:

Rational options are chosen if, and only if, the emotion‐score values they evoke from the evaluative risk/reward system of the emotional brain are high enough to out‐compete their more intuitive rivals

…”