A Meditation on Self and Control

I am a human being. My identity is correlative to my body, from which it springs. The mind produces self, and my mind is just the cognitive action of my brain.

Yet the human being, what it does and what role it can and does play in reality, is a pattern of exquisite complexity within a vastly larger pattern of imponderable complexity. The pattern is continuous; a human being is distinct from his or her environment only by convention, which exists because it does a job. So why should a human make this distinction? For the distinction is made, and is almost always made: that I as self am distinct from all else as other. (Excluding Buddhists in a state of enlightenment, an exception that proves the rule.) What explains this distinction?

The identity of self (that is, my consciousness) and my physical body exists because self is a unit of control. That which is within the domain of my self is expected to be under my control. Self controls that from which it springs. It does so because in doing so, self is increasingly multiplied and empowered. It is a positive feedback loop, a virtuous circle.

Self is an answer to the question: what engenders the highest level of successful control now available?

It's hard to say what success means here. The temptation is to say reproductive success, but that looks like one possible standpoint among many. One could just as well say success of the genes sporting the phenotypic expressions in question. A gene certainly is a unit of control, one that maintains the general tyranny of success over failure. But that doesn't get at the heart of the matter either, because the control goes beyond biology; it even goes beyond self.

In the cosmos of chaos and order, the one we find ourselves in, control is the effort to impose order in chaos. Order imposed is success, at least for the time being; order lost, destroyed or replaced is failure. (Or so it is seen from the standpoint of order. The pattern is made beautiful by the interaction, and if physics is to be believed, chaos wins in the end. But I digress.)

A government is a unit of control over a collection of people and their machines. But it does not exhibit a consciousness. We can't talk to a government; we can only talk to a representative of a government, who is a human being, or their machines, such as a web site. The pattern of control is beyond the scope of self, but it is an abstraction maintained by a collection of selves.

Self may be a bridge allowing control to extend from the purely biological on to kinds that go far beyond. Robotics is not a biological domain (or not as conceived currently, anyway); it is computerized control of metal and plastic, made by human beings. It is self, as within you and me, teaching the rocks to dance, just the way we do. But mere mimicry is only the beginning, the most modest start. Computers were first developed to replace human calculators; and shortly thereafter, blasted past the capability of even the most capable human calculator. Computation has been unshackled from biology; the system has raced far, far beyond that.

Control is ever thus. We are the self-bridge between sub-self control and super-self control. And look around, super-self arises everywhere. In a sense, it was always there, just as two or more selves could communicate to arrange a larger order; and that is just what language is for. It delivers culture, the body of super-self. The question is: when does the culture we've made become more important, more powerful, than its originators? It's happened before. Fascism comes to mind, as its crudest form, and a highly unsuccessful form to boot. But we are all part of what has been termed the spectacle. At some point the spectacle will lift off, no longer requiring even rudimentary biological support, though it may continue to include it. Greater and greater pattern strives to create itself.