Consciousness understood like metacognition (I am the observer/perceptor) or I am a sentient human being.
1. We feel like sentient beings with an unified or global self (the only one). This is our subjective experience (self-unity).
2. The brain-self is modular. There are different selves, each one with different underlying neural circuits and different functions/structure and characteristics. For example: 2.1. The visceral-self related to the limbic system in the right hemisphere and associated with basic emotions and qualia from subcortex. 2.2. The bodily self, related to the limits of our body. It shows high flexibility (Rubber hand illusion or Ramachandran´s Pinocchio nose illusion or the third man illusion). But this flexibility that’s not necessarily means that the body self is an illusion or hallucination. It must be flexible to work properly. Imagine that you are driving a bike, a small car or a truck. In all cases your bodily self should be extended to the vehicle to avoid accidents, to guarantee your survival. Of course it will be bigger in the case of the truck. Probably this body-self is associated to motivation (survival, stress, fight or flee response) and to biological associative learning (synchrony between external senses and interoception in only few trials). It responds to the question: is that me? But like a quick reaction: It is a physical self, to avoid pain… 2.3. The social self. Associated to Theory of Mind, social emotions like shame or proud, empathy. It must decide between cooperation or competitiveness (In this case, the main goal can be “to be the best”, the winner). It follows culture rules, is a kind of mask. The social self can learn by imitation. 2.4. The autobiographical self associated to episodic memory and language, extended in the time line from past to present. 2.5. The future self or future anticipation. Probably associated to prefrontal cortex and brain default network. You can create fantasy, you can anticipate and simulate future events of different types, you can think in the next winter food, your future dead, chronic pain after your illness or how to go from street X to street Y tomorrow in your city in only five minutes. In this last case, world representation and self-representation can interact. Anxiety or depression can be associated to self-anticipation. 2.6. The absent self, in the case of flow states, associated to task attentional brain network activation or clean consciousness. It is related to skills, to experts. 2.7. Other forms of self representation
3. The different selves can be combined, for example in the case of CV (social self plus autobiographical self).
4. Different neurological disorder can damage some forms of the self while others remain intact. In the case of narcissism or psycopath the emotional part of the social self is affected (cero empathy). In Alzheimer, the visceral self could be preserved but the autobiographical one is affected (not updated)…
5. The different brain selves are organized in different brain circuits that belong to different layers. Some are activated bottom up (the bodily self), others overall top-down (the future self). There is not a global self. There is not one superior or inferior.
6. All conscious experience is a self-experience. Different selves produce different conscious experiences. They have different intentions (final cause) and produce different attentional bias. Our attentional disposition produced by the activated self is the observer/actor role.
7. There is a competition between brain selves to produce the conscious experience. The winner affects to the goal, the perception and actions in a context. A self can be activated by a situation (Ortega y Gasset: I am myself and my circumstances) or by an own action (it is not the same to play an expert action that a novel action. I am also my actions: they are performed by different selves).
8. Imagine a context with a social interaction, your reactions and understanding will be different from your visceral self, your autobiographical one, your social one, your motivational one… At the same time, the other person involved in the situation can respond you from his/her visceral self while you are in your social self (there are many options and combinations of between selves interactions). 9. It is not the same (in the same context) to feel that you are in danger, that you feel upset, that you feel shame, that you anticipate a negative result of the interaction…
10. But who is the sentient human being? In my opinion the visceral self (here and now). Who is the observer? (The neural default network?), who is the actor?... Then, we have multiple selves but we experience only one each time. Our temperament and personality (extroverts versus introverts…)can cause that some forms of the self are manifest with higher frequency for a person in particular.
I would like to know your opinion about the self-problem and the unity of the experience.
One more comment. The basic representation of a self is similar to a thermostat (homeostasis), corolary discharge in the motor system or a comparator of inside out signals (eference, interception or goals) with outside-in signals (reaference, exteroception or feeback), overall in time terms (syncrony or asincrony). In the case of congruency the conclusion of the comparator is: it is me (rubber hand illusion, no posible self-tickliness)), go on with the task. In the case of error feedback (incongruency, asyncrony) the conclusion is: it is not me (third man illusion, self-tickling in schizophrenia). Then the system changes from a quick, automatic response (just not pay attention to it) to a controlled-slow mode of processing (focus on it). In this last case, you confront uncertainty and the self-conscious experience occurs and you have to take a new decision.
There should be other forms of self representation, in the brain insula (embodiment) but nothing like an homunculus, a pilot of the system. In the case of visual imagery, you can imagine a dot moving in a cognitive map of a city (your are the dot).
The main idea is that a self is a point of view(a perspective, an intention). We have different selves but they can communicate between them. For example: the body self is related to "where i am?" But if some one try to hit my car, i (the bodily self) is activated and my visceral self produces an emotional-quick response. A thermostat is a possible self-representation, but the thermostat of a house is a material one (it is not alive), then it has not qualia because it is not conected to a mind-body. In the case of human beings, a thermostat in the brain Hypothalamus produces a feeling of hotter or colder in the visceral self of the Insula (a qualia): a sentient temperature
About the question: where I am?It is by default an automatic information processing but it can become conscious. It is clear when you awake after anaesthetic or in the third man illusion: the thermostat offers a message of asyncrony (an error message: it is not me, it is other one) then the body self is observed from a third point of view instead of first point of view.
Any perception is egocentric. Imagine a room with two windows. The left and the right one, when you are looking at the windows. You are in the room for the first time, looking through the left window outside. You see a traffic light near the left corner of the window. One week after, you are in the room for second time, but now you look outside through the right window and you can not see the trafic light. Then you wonder and ask to the house owner: What happened with the traffic light that was there last week? Your mind computed an egocentric map and misslocalized the position of the traffic light (near the left part of the window), but you do not compute from which window (reference point). Consciousness is your point of view here and now. If you find incongruencies with the past experience like in the second time you visit the room, then you are conscious of the point of view to update your representation of the world. The main difference between the first and the second visit was your body location (where you are: the body self representation) and these different points of view here and now produce different conscious experiences.
The self is a frame of reference for conscious experience. The chain of processing is this one: 1. You react to stimulus (your actions and the situation), what produces 2. A state of the self (one of the selves is activated, it wins the competition, probably the winner is the one where the system detects an incogruency, asyncrony or discrepancies: the body self, the visceral self, the social self, the autobiographical one...). 3 The activated self causes an attentional bias. 4 The attentional state (task network versus default network activation: inner or outter attention, global or focalized) affects overall to the content of consciousness (if the self is included or not in the experience: if i am observer or actor).
States of the self is different from traits of the self
Imagine that the cortex produces an internal movie (mental imagery, REM dreams, internal voice...), the question is: who is the public? the observer is the self. When i see a hollywood movie in the cinema screen it produces inside me feelings (ativation of my visceral self): Is anything magic here?. When I observe my internal movie (conscious experience) it produces also feelings. Only part of my Information Processing becomes conscious in the cortex, but this part affects my emotional-self (this feedback to the visceral self in the limbic cortical and subcortical system). We have a botton up processing to the cortex and a top down from the cortex to the emotional brain. This interplay of emotional regulation is one of the main versions of conscious experience. The top down way produces feelings (conscious experience) due to embodiment or ideasthesia, what means feelings are due to the conecction between emotial brain (anterior Cingulate cortex, Brain Insula, amygdala...) with the peripheral nervous system, overall with the autonomus system. We have hot -symbols in the insula (feelings encoded there). The activation of this hotsymbols produces body states (high pulse or heart ratio, pain...) and we detect that from exteroception and also interoception: then we integrate this body states with the internal movie and its sounds and this is our consious experience.
