Free Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio

inform the policy. This is precisely what the homeostatic design that we find in creatures of all levels of complexity consists of: a collection of operation guidelines that must be followed for the organism to achieve its goals. The essence of the guidelines is quite simple: if this is present, then do that.
    When one surveys the spectacle of evolution, one is astounded by its many accomplishments. Consider, for example, the successful development of eyes, not only eyes that resemble ours but other varieties of eyes that do their job using slightly different means. No less astonishing is the marvel of echolocation, which allows bats and barn owls to hunt in complete darkness guided by exquisite sound localization in three-dimensional space. The evolution of a response policy capable of leading organisms to a homeostatic state is no less spectacular.
    The rhyme and reason behind the existence of a response policy is the achievement of a homeostatic goal. But as I hinted earlier, even with a clear-cut goal, something else is needed for a response policy to be executed effectively. For a certain action to be achieved expeditiously and correctly, there must be an incentive so that, in certain circumstances, certain kinds of responses can be favored over others. Why? Because some circumstances of the living tissue may be so dire that they require urgent and decisive correction, and a literally breathless correction must be rapidly deployed. Likewise, some opportunities may be so conducive to the betterment of the living tissue that responses endorsing those opportunities must be selected and engaged rapidly. This is where we find the machinations behind what we have come to know, from our human perspective, as reward and punishment, the lead players in the dance of motivated exploration. Note that none of these operations requires a mind, let alone a conscious mind. There is no formal “subject” inside or outside an organism behaving as a “rewarder” or as a “punisher.” Yet “rewards” and “punishments” are administered based on the design of response policy systems. The entire operation is as blind and “subject-less” as gene networks themselves are. Absence of mind and of self is perfectly compatible with spontaneous and implicit “intention” and “purpose.” The basic “intention” of the design is to maintain structure and state, but a larger “purpose” can be construed from such multiple intentions: to survive.
    What I am suggesting, then, is that incentive mechanisms are necessary to achieve successful guidance of behavior, which amounts to a successful, economic execution of the cell’s business plan. I am also suggesting that the incentive mechanisms and the guidance did not arise from conscious determination and deliberation. There was no explicit knowledge and no deliberative self.
    The guidance of incentive mechanisms has been made gradually more known to minded and conscious organisms such as ours. The conscious mind simply reveals what has long existed as an evolutionary mechanism of life regulation. But the conscious mind did not create the mechanism. The real story stands our intuition on its head. The actual historical sequence is reversed.
Developing Incentives
     
    How did incentives develop? Incentives began in very simple organisms but are very evident in organisms whose brains are capable of measuring the degree of need for a certain correction. For the measurement to occur, the brain required a representation of (1) the current state of the living tissue, (2) the desirable state of the living tissue corresponding to the homeostatic goal, and (3) a simple comparison. Some kind of internal scale was developed for this purpose, signifying how far the goal was relative to the current state, while chemical molecules whose presence sped up certain responses were adopted to facilitate the correction. We are still sensing our organism states in terms of such a scale, something we do