THE EVER-CHANGING SELF

Most of us who know the least little bit at all about biology (fundie Xtians excused) know that our cells replace themselves. Roughly every seven years, we are “evolved again” (my word). Of course, I didn’t know until Antonio Damasio taught me that the “precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart and the cells of the lens” do not replace themselves. (The Feeling of What Happens, p. 144) In his marvelous study of how consciousness evolved, I find a great deal of interesting reading and one fascinating passage is the following one so marvelously poetic about the constant replacement of the body as it ceaselessly reinvents the structure that evolution has given it.

[SNIPPLE]
We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span—some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart, and the cells of the lens. Most of the components that do not get substituted—such as the neurons—get changed by learning. (In fact, nothing being sacred, even some neurons may get substituted.) Life makes neurons behave differently by altering, for instance, the way they connect with others. No component remains the same for very long, and most of the cells and tissues that constitute our bodies today are not the same we owned when we entered college. What remains the same, in good part, is the construction plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts. Call it the spirit of the form and the spirit of the function.

When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all, that we have—that most of us have, some of us have—some continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity, some stable traits of behavior we call a personality. Fabulous indeed, amazing for certain, that you are you and I am me.

But the problem goes beyond perishability and renewal. Just as death and life cycles reconstruct the organism and its parts according to a plan, the brain reconstructs the sense of self moment by moment. We do not have a self sculpted in stone and, like stone, resistant to the ravages of time. Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being. The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse should the process of rebuilding and renewal break down. The 
construction plans are all woven around the need to stay away from the brink.
[PASTIE]

I am doing this at two to three in the morning as the object, George Bush, arising from my memory banks, has chosen to impinge its ghastly presence upon my hapless organism, rendering it alert and sensing danger when it should be replenishing itself with sleep.

PS: Call the tree, raising its arms into the sky, a "forest monster". Does it give you that eerie feeling like forests do in some of these recent children's movies like Harry Potter, those boring, endless Ring tales and that old Wizard of "if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times" Oz?

EMOTIONS ARE NOT INCORPOREAL, MORAL ENTITIES
BUT VERY PHYSICAL THINGS

I know that anyone who has really thought about his or her emotional life probably knows the information which follows, yet, for me, it was not that long ago that I fully realized that emotions are really nothing more than physical states in the body. The names we give to various of those body states make us believe that emotions have an existence other than their embodied existence as neurological and chemical states, but Antonio Damasio explains the situation very thoroughly in the following paragraphs from his book, The Feeling of What Happens (pp.50-52). Once one begins to think of emotions as purely chemical or neurological states, he can begin to rethink so much he has been taught about the “morality” of emotional states. Emotions are neither wrong nor right, sinful or wholesome; emotions just ARE.

[SNIP]
The mention of the word emotion usually calls to mind one of the six so-called primary or universal emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust. Thinking about the primary emotions makes the discussion of the problem easier, but it is important to note that there are numerous other behaviors to which the label "emotion" has been attached. They include so-called secondary or social emotions, such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, or pride; and what I call background emotions, such as well-being or malaise, calm or tension. The label emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to the states of pain and pleasure.

A shared biological core underlies all these phenomena, and it can be outlined as follows:

1. Emotions are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern; all emotions have some kind of regulatory role to play, leading in one way or another to the creation of circumstances advantageous to the organism exhibiting the phenomenon; emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.

2. Notwithstanding the reality that learning and culture alter the expression of emotions and give emotions new meanings, emotions are biologically determined processes, depending on innately set brain devices, laid down by a long evolutionary history.

3. The devices which produce emotions occupy a fairly restricted ensemble of subcortical regions, beginning at the level of the brain stem and moving up to the higher brain; the devices are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states, which will be discussed in chapter 5.

4. All the devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation; the considerable amount of individual variation and the fact that culture plays a role in shaping some inducers do not deny the fundamental stereotypicity, automaticity, and regulatory purpose of the emotions.

5. All emotions use the body as their theater (internal milieu, visceral, vestibular and musculoskeletal systems), but emotions also affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits: the variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.
[PASTE]