Lump of Jelly

“One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. ‘Who am I’ is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.”

The above is the beginning of an essay about the self and qualia by the

neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. By “qualia” is meant the redness that you experience when you see something red, the what-it’s-like-to-experience-something, the way pain actually feels. Fancy word for a simple idea. As for the “self,” the idea is even simpler: the one who sees, the one who hurts, the one who wakes up in the morning.

Our pets seem to have little pet-selves (and they obviously have brains). I doubt they have self-esteem, although the other day I watched a little black and white dog retrieve a ball in the park and drop it at the feet of its mistress, then look up her with a sort of pride as well as anticipation, or so it seemed to me. That is, so it seemed to my self. Or maybe it’s the “my” in “my self.”

Particularly interesting in the Ramachandran article are descriptions of certain brain-related “disorders which illustrate different aspects of self.” For instance, “Cotards syndrome; the patient claims he is dead and rejects all evidence to the contrary.....A person with Cotard's syndrome will deny that he exists; claiming that his body is a mere empty shell. Explaining these disorders in neural terms can help illuminate how the normal self is constructed.”