EXPANDING UNIVERSE: A Quick Look at the Energetics of "I"

EDS' NOTE: This is an emerging theory on the evolution of consciousness referenced in "Racing Time" (here).

Life evolved in a world where the number one threat was - and is - entropy: the tendency toward randomness in a system. It takes a lot of energy to counter entropy and significantly more to perform the basic jobs of life, so all forms of life have intelligence systems that have been honed by evolution to acquire, manage, and direct energetic resources.
Plants manage their energetic needs with a complex, integrated hormonal system. Animals have a more complex "centralized" neuro-hormonal system. Yet from the plankton in the sea to the bacteria in the soil, from the flowers in an urban garden to the wildcats in the bush, all living things have intelligence systems with the same functional goal: to ensure that energy is always available for action. Everything else is secondary to meeting this energetic bottom line.
All members of the animal kingdom share the same basic intelligence system in that we all have the capacity to behave. The energetic benefits of behavior are enormous - sources of energy can be caught or cultivated; energy can be conserved in a den or a high-rise; and predators can be fought or evaded. But while behavior helps us to make our energetic ends meet, it also makes life more complicated.
Here's the problem: Behavior itself is energetically expensive - we must use energy in order to even attempt to get more. If we choose wrong, we run out of energy and die. Nature's solution to this economic conundrum is a behavioral intelligence system that acts as an energetic cost/benefit analysis and prediction system. To this end, it creates a neural record of our experiences, a "representation" with all of the pertinent details of each relevant moment, especially the attendant energetic costs and benefits. When we find ourselves in a situation similar to one we've encountered before, the system uses this stored information to "model" various behavioral options, estimate their likely costs and benefits, modify the one that most closely approximates our current circumstances, and chart an energetically sound course into the future. If we listen to our thoughts, to the weighing of pros and cons in our decision-making processes, it becomes evident that our behavioral intelligence system doesn't simply influence our psychological state, it creates it. (To understand how our moods are determined by our energy states, read "Beyond the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," S&H fall 1999, here.)
Even our sense of "self" is created by the neural record of our energy choices. How? Neural networks exhibit something called "hierarchical processing": Any information that is common across a series of network representations gets recorded in a new network representation at a higher level of the system. This hierarchical processing enables us to do many things - to form categories and concepts, identify people and objects, recognize patterns, and more. And because this process is constantly occurring as we engage in each of the various roles in our life, some very special higher-order representations are being created. Rich with specific principled information, they oversee the different sectors of our life. They are our selves - the repositories of instantly available essential information about the physical and social energetic environment we navigate from day to day.
Ultimately, self-representations are themselves culled for their commonalities, and the resulting creation is our "highest order" or higher self. When our thoughts and actions emanate from this place within us, they arise from a place endowed with the collective "principled truths" of our entire life's experience, as well as an anthology of ancestral wisdom about the energetic universe that is our home.
Peggy La Cerra, Ph.D.