The self isn’t a persistent thing. It fades in and out of existence, conjured by a biological machine like the stale image from an old slide projector. It comes and goes, not with a regular ebb and flow like the tide, but erratically, motivated by some external factors which we must come to understand. With its arrhythmic beat we pulse in and out of existence. Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”, but what then are we for the moment when we thought not?
Indeed, the self fades in and out of existence. Deindividuation is one way of it—to relax the burden of selfhood and exist momentarily as part of a whole. This is what occurs within the crucible of the mosh pit, where under the intense heat of molten flesh, fire of rage and thunder of blast beats, the self all but disappears. No self-centered thoughts like behavioral propriety, no thoughts of what others will say, no plans for the future, no wrangling over the past. No thoughts of bills to pay, papers to write, careers to make, statuses to update, dates to keep: Only the most vague sense of right now. Mosh, push, shove, survive, dance, and howl in Bacchic annihilation.
My heart is pounding out of my chest, 180 BPM. Throat is raw and lungs about to burst. The blast beat fades into a melodic transition. The weak signal from the self slowly emerges—pulling me back from the edge of oblivion. Retreat. Breathe. Maintain.
Safely out of the pit, I become aware of myself again. The burning pain in my chest, and a certain surprise at my recklessness. I see the girl I was flirting with before. There’s another guy she’s talking to. Who is he? Is he more impressive than I am? What does she think of me? Where do I stand? Jealously, longing, anxiety, anger, resentment, my Machiavellian mind is assessing the situation, estimating probabilities, and calculating a course of action. I have become fully self-conscious.
Where and when does the self disappear? This may be a key to understanding what we really are. Therefore, we must develop a means to measure the self. Observe the dynamic correlation between consciousness interacting with time. Understand this mysteriously evolving relationship, a temporal function, but what else? Evolutionary theory suggests thatthe ‘what else’ is a function of selection pressures. The self is an adaption that favored survival and reproduction under a certain, but ultimately unknowable, set of circumstances. Yett we can conjecture, and not altogether ignorantly. The self was called upon when I was preoccupied with the girl from the dance floor, but not when I was in battle. Within the battle I was gone. My body was on its own, running an emergency, autonomous program called berzerker rage. Who was around me didn’t matter. The berzerker has no need of nuanced social distinctions. In the presence of a mate, social distinction is paramount; n-player multidyadic chess. Everybody is against everybody, but we are all locked in varying degrees of interdependence. Men and women can’t mate without one another and men can’t fight alone. To do this, nature packed the human body plan with three and a half pounds of biological cognition, tuned to optimize an expected payoff across countess simultaneous and parallel utility functions; calculations far too complex for any computer of my day.
But the human brain is more than an information-computational system, it’s a hybrid dynamical-system with both logical and mechanical hardwiring. We can solve problems by thinking about them, or rely on essentially mechanical processes requiring virtually no computation. Computation is costly and isn’t always necessary. When instinct is enough, let the conscious mind rest. In the crucible of battle, the self will have nothing of the blood and the death and the gore, and reason it’s way out the door! No, the self doesn’t get to play then; s/he sits this one out.
