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Reading the brain through the lens of Emily Dickinson’s poem seems to me to function as a better summary of accumulated observations than Descartes’. In Antonio Damasio’s ‘The Feeling of What Happens’ (this author also wrote a book entitled ‘Descartes’ Error’ so you can see where this is going...), Damasio writes, “some aspects of the processes of consciousness can be related to the operation of specific brain regions and systems, thus opening the door to discovering the neural architecture which supports consciousness” (15). Following this, he states that “consciousness and wakefulness, as well as consciousness and low-level attention, can be separated” (15), and these observations lead me to prefer Dickinson’s model of thought, since the correlations between behavior and its neural geography seem to be emerging more and more. Damasio goes further to divide consciousness into the “core self” and the autobiographical self,” which at first presents itself as a Cartesian split, but is much more nuanced and drawn from laboratory-generated observations (as opposed to Descartes’ internal observations of self and other, which are highly legitimate but derived form something less scientifically malleable/approachable than Damasio’s observations/source body of information). The “core self,” which is the self existent during “core consciousness” (“a sense of self about one moment – now – and about one place – here... does not illuminate a whole being...” [16-17] and lacks all continuity and repeatability, both features that typically define “The Self”), entails a total absence of identity (perhaps what Cartesians fear?) because it behaves as “a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts” (17). Its counterpart, the “autobiographical self,” employs “systematic memories of situations in which ore consciousness was involved in the knowing of the most invariant characteristics of an organism’s life – who you were born to, where, when, your likes and dislikes, the way you usually react to a problem or a conflict, your name, and so on” (17).
 
So what’s the difference between Descartes’ “body” and Damasio’s “core self,” and where does Descartes’ concept of mind differ from the “autobiographical self”? As far as I can tell, the workings of the “autobiographical self” – problems such as memory, mortality, identity, character – seem to match up with neurobiological functions more than one would expect. First of all, Damasio’s understanding of consciousness (as a largely biological phenomenon) is what mediates, filers, and even directs the way that emotions are processed, since “an organism may represent in neural and mental patterns the state that we conscious creatures call a feeling, without ever knowing that the feeling is taking place” (36). I feel pretty comfortable in the company of Damasio and Dickinson, but sometimes the classicist in me peeks its head above ground and asks me, “really?” Am I comfortable entrusting my selfhood to biological functions and a layered series of filters that are inextricably mine but not necessarily a product of something I “did,” or some way that I “am”? Can I operate as I always have, knowing that my selfhood may be secondary to the gook in my brain, with my only solace being that it is special gook: My Gook?
To be continued...