The empathic ego

Have you ever watched a child who has just learned to walk run toward
a desired object much too quickly and then trip and fall on his face? The
child lifts his head, turns, and searches for his mother. He does so with a
completely empty facial expression, showing no kind of emotional response.
He looks into his mother’s face to find out what has happened.
How bad was it, really? Should I cry or should I laugh?
Toddlers do not yet have an autonomous self-model (though probably
none of us has a self-model that is truly independent from others). In
such small children, we observe an important fact about the nature of
our own phenomenal Ego: It has social correlates as well as neural correlates.
The toddler does not yet know how he should feel; therefore he
looks at his mother’s face in order to define the emotional content of his
own conscious self-experience. His self-model does not yet have a stable
emotional layer to which he could attend and, as it were, register the
severity of what just happened. The fascinating point is that here are
two biological organisms that just a few months ago, before being physically
separated at birth, were one. Their Egos, their phenomenal selfmodels,
are still intimately coupled on the functional level. When the
toddler gazes at his mother and starts to smile in relief, there is a sudden
transition in his PSM. Suddenly, he discovers that he didn’t hurt himself at all, that the only thing that happened to him was a big surprise. An
ambiguity is resolved: Now he knows how he feels.
There are kinds of self-experience that an isolated being could never
have. Many layers of our self-model require social correlates; more than
that, they are frequently created by some sort of social interaction. It is
plausible to assume that if a child does not learn to activate the corresponding
parts of his emotional Ego during a certain crucial period of
his psychological development, he will not be able to have those feelings
as an adult. We can enter certain regions in our phenomenal-state space
only with the help of other human beings. In a more general sense, certain
types of subjective experiences—interpersonal connectedness,
trust, friendship, self-confidence—may be more or less available to each
of us. The degree to which individuals have access to their emotional
states varies. The same is true of their capacity for empathy and the ease
with which they can read the minds of other human beings. Ego Tunnels
develop in a social environment, and the nature of this environment determines
to what extent one Ego Tunnel can resonate with other Ego
Tunnels.
So far, we have been concerned only with how the world and the self
appear in the tunnel created by the brain. But what about other selves?
How can other agents with other goals, other thinkers of thoughts,
other feeling selves, become parts of one’s own inner reality? We can
also express this question in philosophical terms. At the beginning of
this book, we asked how a first-person perspective can emerge in the
brain. The answer was that it does so through the creation of the Ego
Tunnel. Now we can ask, What about the second-person perspective? Or
the “we,” the first-person-plural perspective? How does the conscious
brain manage to get from the “I” to the “you” and the “we”? The
thoughts, goals, feelings, and needs of other living beings in our environment
constitute part of our own reality; therefore, it is vital to understand
how our brains were able to represent and create not just the
inward perspective of the Ego Tunnel but also a world containing multiple
Egos and multiple perspectives. Perhaps we will discover that large
parts of the first-person perspective did not simply emerge in the brain but were in part causally enabled by the social context we all found ourselves
in from the very beginning.
The self-model theory holds that certain new layers of consciousness,
unique to the self-model of Homo sapiens, made the transition
from biological to cultural evolution possible. This process started on an
unconscious, automatic level in our brains, and its roots reach far down
into the animal kingdom. There is an evolutionary continuity to such
high-level social phenomena as the unique human capacity for consciously
acknowledging others as rational subjects and moral persons.
In chapter 2, I pointed out that in the history of ideas, the concept of
“consciousness” was intimately related to possession of a “conscience”—
the higher-order ability to assess the moral value of your lower-order
mental states or your behavior. What kind of self-model do you need in
order to become such a moral agent? The answer could have to do with
the progression from a mental representation of the first-personsingular
perspective to that of the first-person plural, along with the
ability to represent mentally what the benefits (or risks) of a particular
action would be for the collective as a whole. You become a moral agent
by taking the coherence and stability of your group into account. In this
way, the evolution of morals may have had a lot to do with an organism’s
ability to distance itself mentally from a representation of its individual
interests and consciously and explicitly to represent principles of group
selection, even if this involved self-damaging behavior. Recall that the
beautiful early philosophical theories of consciousness-as-conscience
rested on installing an ideal observer in your mind. I believe the human
self-model was successful because it installed your social group as an
ideal observer in your mind, and to a much stronger degree than was the
case in any other primate brain. This created a dense causal linkage between
global group-control and global self-control—a new kind of ownership,
as it were.
Investigators of these phenomena will have to look at chimpanzees
and macaques, at swarms of fish and flocks of birds, and maybe even at
ant colonies. They will also have to look at the way infants imitate their
parents’ facial expressions. Intersubjectivity started deep down in the realms of biological behavior coordination, in the motor regions of the
brain and the unconscious layers of the Ego. Intersubjectivity is anchored
in intercorporality.