Hierarchical Brain

Self symbol schema

The self symbol schema is my term for the large symbol schema in the brain that represents the self; it is a model within the brain of both the body and the brain, so is a self-referential entity. This enables us to think of ourselves and what we are thinking about and is a requirement for creating our sense of self-awareness.

The self symbol schema is at level 4 in my hierarchical structure of levels of description, along with all other symbol schemas, although it perhaps seems as though it should be higher because it takes longer to develop and become useful than most other symbol schemas. Once self-awareness is in place, at level 6, it becomes clear that I am my self symbol schema.

I have deliberately not used a hyphen in the name because there is a double meaning as both a self-symbol schema (a schema for the self-symbol), but also a self symbol-schema (a symbol schema for the self).

Overview

• The self symbol schema is created in the same way as all other symbol schemas as the inevitable end result of the recursive and hierarchical memory-enhanced coincidence detection that I call afferent processing of incoming data.
  • The brain analyses data received from the outside world, compresses it and extracts the general features to create representative symbols, because that is all it can do to try to increase its chances of survival. These will become perceptions.
  • Using exactly the same processes, it does the same with data from “internal” senses and also from within the brain itself to create another symbol that represents the subject of the perceptions, the entity that is doing the perceiving.
• The basic architecture of the self symbol schema consists of three hierarchical layers:
  1. The schema or model of the body, both its external features and locations and its internal workings.
  2. Schemas or models of the processes of the brain, firstly attention, and then others such as memory, perception, action and free will. These can only be built once the first layer is in place.
  3. All memories and information gathered relating to the self, including properties of the self such as desires, plans and personality. These can only be built once the other two layers are in place.
• The self symbol schema takes several years to fully develop in babies, and until the first two layers are in place no episodic memories can be stored, because there is no subject to which to attach them.

Details of my proposals

• The symbol schema that represents the self is the most important symbol schema in many respects:
  • It is active or in use more of the time than any other.
    • There must be many areas within it that are active all the time (while we are alive), but it is also communicating with many other parts of the brain nearly all the time.
    • Whenever I am conscious (in the commonly-used sense, by which I mean I am paying attention to something) it is being accessed, and whenever I store or retrieve memories, it is in use.
    • The only times when its activity is lessened is when I am in deep sleep, in a coma or under general anaesthetic.
  • It has the most links to other symbol schemas.
    • It has links to all symbol schemas that can be the subject of attention (which is almost all of them).
    • Because of this, in can act as a go-between creating indirect links between two or more ordinary symbol schemas that do not have direct links between them.
  • Partly because of the two preceding factors, it must be by far the biggest symbol schema in terms of the number of neurons that it contains.
  • It is the only one that is essential for the body and brain to operate properly.
    • It has symbol schemas within it that represent and help control vital body functions such as autonomous actions.
    • It also models and helps operate a number of internal brain processes such as attention, action and memories, and therefore brings about self-awareness and consciousness.
  • It is the only symbol schema that models itself and it is therefore self-referential.
    • The self symbol schema models itself to the same extent that other symbol schemas model the thing that they represent, which means not necessarily completely or accurately, but in sufficient detail for the needs of the brain.
    • In particular, as I have detailed on my page called cognoception (the perception of internal brain processes), the schemas of my brain processes cannot model the aspects that are unconscious, so they are less complete than all normal symbols schemas, but probably just as accurate in the conscious areas where they can be modelled.
    • (As a mind-boggling aside, having written that the self symbol schema is the only symbol schema that is self-referential, I realised that the symbol schema in my brain that represents the concept of a symbol schema is also self-referential, but this is not quite at the same level.)
  • It is different from most other symbol schemas because it is generated largely, although not exclusively, from data from internal senses.
    • It therefore includes many subcortical neurons that have links to parts of the body and other parts of the subcortical brain.
    • All symbol schemas that are not part of the self symbol schema consist mainly of neurons in the cerebral cortex and have links to the external senses.
• I propose that the self symbol schema consists of three hierarchical layers that are built upon each other. This is very similar to Antonio Damasio’s theory of consciousness, but my definitions are somewhat different, particularly for the second and third levels, and I do not claim that these on their own are a theory of consciousness. The three levels are:
  1. The schema of the body, built from data relating to the position of parts of the body, known as proprioception, and from data that monitors the internal state of the body, called homeostasis.
     • This is the lowest level and is almost certainly present in a similar form in all animals that have centralised brains, because it is necessary to monitor and control the body and its basic functions.
     • It is the basis of low-level feelings.
     • This is the same as the lowest level of Damasio’s theory that he calls the “proto-self” or “protoself”¹.
  2. Schemas of the processes of the brain, built from the data generated inside the brain by the process I call cognoception.
     • This level cannot develop until the first level is at least partly in place. It is probably present in all animals that are able to adapt to their environments, because it is needed to control brain functions.
     • Damasio calls this level “core consciousness”, but describes it in more vague terms^{2, 4} (see also the Wikipedia section on core consciousness).
     • The implication is that this level creates self-awareness, but I think that, although it is a requirement for self-awareness, another level of processing involving the symbol schema for attention is needed before self-awareness comes about (see self-awareness).
  3. Connections to all other memories and information gathered about the self require the lower two layers.
     • This level cannot develop until the first two levels are in place because information about the self needs the definition of the self as the object.
     • This level is likely to be present in all higher animals, and certainly all mammals, although without language it will not be as detailed as it is in humans.
     • It contains connections to all my episodic and autobiographical memories and all properties that I attach to myself, including my preferences, beliefs, desires, goals and personality.
     • Damasio calls this “extended consciousness”³, but it has also been referred to as the “autobiographical self”, although it is clearly concerned with much more than just autobiographical memories.
     • The actual information about these properties of the self are stored in symbol schemas that are separate from the self symbol schema, but connections to the self can only be made once the lower two layers are fully in place.
  Although Damasio calls his proposals a theory of consciousness, it has been pointed out (see Damasio’s theory - criticism) that the existence of the three layers does not in itself provide consciousness; I think self-awareness is a prerequisite for consciousness, but self-awareness requires the self symbol schema.
• The self symbol schema forms gradually in a baby and is probably not fully developed in a young child until the age of over three years⁵.
  • When a baby starts to kick in the womb, and then after birth moves their limbs around seemingly at random, they are matching their predictions against the sense data coming back, and updating their primitive models⁶ (see action - babies for further details).
  • By the age of 3 to 5 months a basic body model has been shown to be at least partly in place⁷.
  • From around 18 months old, a child starts to become aware of themselves as an individual and can recognise themselves in a mirror^{8, 9}.
  • By around two years old, a child starts to be aware that there are other people like themselves¹⁰.
  • It takes up to two and a half years for the full schema of their own bodies to be complete⁶.
  • Full realisation of themselves as an individual, and in comparison with other individuals, and full linkage of episodic memory to the self, arrives even later, but is usually in place by the age of 4. This ties in with so-called childhood amnesia, the inability of young children to retain memories, until the object of the memory, the self model, is fully in place.
  • The complex process of attention can only start to work properly when a lot of the self symbol schema is in place, because it uses efferent connections and reinstatement from the self symbol schema. This explains why young children cannot concentrate on a single thing (see attention milestones, for example).
• Only a small number of writers (that I have been able to locate) have discussed a self symbol in any detail.
  • The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger uses the term “Phenomenal Self-Model” (PSM) for a model of the self, and makes very clear that he believes it is a real thing, but gives no detail on what it actually consists of or how it is created¹¹.
  • Douglas Hofstadter, in his wide-ranging 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach, goes into quite a bit of practical detail on what the self symbol must consist of and what it must do.
    • He uses the term “symbol” for a concept but says that the symbol for the self should be called a “subsystem” because it functions almost as an independent subbrain, although he does add that there is no real distinction between symbols and subsystems¹².
      • I prefer the term “self symbol schema” to emphasise that it is created in the same way as all other symbol schemas and has the same structure and definitions as all other symbol schemas.
      • I acknowledge that it is more of a superset of symbol schemas compared with all other symbol schemas.
    • He says that the self-subsystem keeps track of what other symbols are active, so that there are symbols for symbols, and symbols for the actions of symbols. He also says that the reason a self-symbol has to exist is so that an animal can not only make sense of the world but also make sense of its role as an object in relation to the other things in the world¹³.
    • In his later book of 2007, I am a strange loop, Hofstadter says that the self-symbol starts small in a baby and builds on feedback from our bodies, to grow into the most important abstract structure in our brains, being spread out all over the brain¹⁴.
• Reinstatement that provides feelings, emotions, qualia and meaning is applicable to the self symbol schema just as for all other symbol schemas, but with slightly different results.
  • Efferent connections that are used for reinstatement go back towards where the data came from, which for many parts of the self symbol schema will be to subcortical areas.
  • These efferent connections are very limited, and mostly not available for conscious access, which is why my feelings or qualia or even meaning for these internal stimuli are often vague and very difficult to put into words.
  • For example, it is easy to describe the detailed impact on the external senses of a severe thunderstorm that I experienced last week, but it is much more difficult to describe the internal feeling it generated, whether it was awe, fright or fear. I also know the difficulty of describing the experience of a having a high temperature or feeling ill.

---

References For information on references, see structure of this website - references

1. ^ Consciousness: An overview of the phenomenon and of its possible neural basis - Damasio and Meyer 2009
   Chapter 1 in the book “The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology” - ed. Laureys and Tononi 2009
   downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 8, right-hand column, third paragraph: “The brain represents varied aspects of the structure and current state of the organism in a large number of neural maps from the level of the brainstem and hypothalamus to that of the primary and association somatosensory cortices (e.g., SI, S2, insular cortex, parietal cortex), and, for example, the cingulate cortex. The state of the internal milieu, the viscera, the vestibular apparatus, and the musculoskeletal system are thus continuously represented as a set of activities we call the 'proto-self'.”
2. ^ Ibid. Consciousness: An overview of the phenomenon and of its possible neural basis
   Page 6, under the heading “Varieties of consciousness”, second paragraph: “The sense of self which emerges in core consciousness is the 'core self', a transient form of knowledge, recreated for each and every object with which the organism interacts.”
   Page 7, third paragraph: “...core consciousness is a prerequisite for the focusing and enhancement of attention and working memory; enables the establishment of explicit memories; is indispensable for language and normal communication; and renders possible the intelligent manipulations of images (e.g., planning, problem solving, and creativity).”
3. ^ Ibid. Consciousness: An overview of the phenomenon and of its possible neural basis
   Abstract, third sentence: “'Extended consciousness' occurs when objects are related to the organism not only in the 'here and now' but in a broader context encompassing the organism’s past and its anticipated future.”
   Page 6, under the heading “Varieties of consciousness”, fifth sentence: “Extended consciousness is a complex biological phenomenon and is mentally layered across levels of information; it evolves during the lifetime of the organism; it depends on memory; and it is enhanced by language.”
4. ^ The strange order of things: Life, feeling and the making of cultures - Antonio Damasio Pantheon Books USA 2018
   See page 151, second paragraph “... part of the process of subjectivity is made from the same kind of material with which we construct the manifest contents held in subjectivity, specifically, images. But while the kind of material is the same, the source is different. Rather than corresponding to the objects, actions, or events, which normally dominate consciousness, these particular images correspond to general images of our own bodies, as a whole, caught in the act of producing those other images. This new set of images constitutes a partial revelation of the process of making the manifest contents of mind deftly and quietly inserted along those other images [sic].... The new set of images helps describe nothing less than the owner’s body in the process of acquiring other images, but unless you pay close attention, you hardly notice them.”
   This seems to be saying, in rather imprecise language, that the brain creates 'images' (which are what I call symbol schemas) that represent the making of other images, i.e. the process of perception. So this is very similar to my cognoception.
5. ^ The Cognitive Neurosciences ed. Gazzaniga Fourth Edition MIT Press USA 2009
   Chapter 9 “Memory”, Page 390, under the heading “Declarative Memory”, first column: “Episodic memories always include the self as the agent or recipient of some action.”
   And second column, second paragraph : “Episodic and semantic memory appear at different ages. Babies who are 2 years old have been able to demonstrate recall of things they had witnessed at age 13 months. It isn’t until children are at least 18 months, however, that they actually seem to include themselves as part of the memory, although this ability tends to be more reliably present in 3- to 4-year olds.”
6. ^ ^ The Head Bone's Connected to the Neck Bone - When do Toddlers Represent Their Own Body Topography - Brownell, Nichols, Svetlova, Zerwas and Ramani 2010
   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01434.x downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 1, end of abstract: “It is concluded that children possess an explicit, if rudimentary, topographic representation of their own body’s shape, structure, and size by 30 months of age.”
   Page 1, beginning of main text: “Children begin learning about their own bodies as newborns. Within a few hours of birth neonates can tell if the hand caressing their cheek belongs to someone else or is their own. As infants use their bodies to engage the world - moving through space, watching their own hands and feet, playing with objects and people - they discover how their bodies move, what their bodies are capable of, and how their bodies and body parts relate to other things in the world. Thus, infants differentiate their bodies and actions from the physical and social world very early, developing a pre-reflective, 'tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic ...bodily self' over the course of the first year. This implicit, perceptually specified bodily self becomes explicit and available to conscious awareness beginning in the second year of life as toddlers become able to take their own bodies and actions as objects of reflective thought. Recent studies have shown that children become consciously aware of the size of their own bodies and of their bodies as potential obstacles or impediments late in the second year of life, with development continuing into at least the third year.”
7. ^ The Development of Body Self-Awareness - Moore, Mealiea, Garon, Povinelli 2010
   doi: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2007.tb00220.x downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 158, first paragraph: “For example, Bahrick and Watson demonstrated that infants from 3 to 5 months were able to detect the correspondence between visual and proprioceptive information of their own movements in the sense that they could extract an amodal [relating not to only one sense] temporal invariance when presented with live video of their own leg movements. There is also evidence that such young infants can also extract spatial invariances across visual and proprioceptive information.”
8. ^ Ibid. The Development of Body Self-Awareness
   Page 158, second paragraph: “Amsterdam reported that late in the first year and early in the second, children’s most common response was to show a combination of social behavior to the mirror image, searching for the image in or behind the mirror, and observing the effects of their own movement in the mirror. Only after 18 months did children start to show evidence of recognizing the image as the self by touching the mark on their own faces.”
9. ^ “So Big”: The Development of Body Self-Awareness in Toddlers - Brownell, Zerwas and Ramani 2007
   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01075.x downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   First page, first paragraph of main text: “In the latter half of the second year of life, children first exhibit clear evidence of reflective self-awareness, that is, that they represent and reflect on themselves as independent, objective entities. This is manifested in their ability to recognize themselves in mirrors, refer to themselves by name, point to themselves referentially, and express self-conscious emotions.”
10. ^ Understanding Self and Others in the Second Year - Moore 2007
    downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 2, end of first paragraph: “...by the end of the second year, toddlers have acquired a level of social understanding that recognizes self and others as similar yet separate individuals who have different psychological orientations to objects or situations in the world.”
11. ^ Being no one: the self-model theory of subjectivity - Metzinger 2003 MIT Press or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 299, second paragraph, under the heading “What Is a Phenomenal Self-Model? [(PSM)]”: “The content of the PSM is the content of the conscious self: your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing. They are constituents of your PSM. ... All those properties of yourself, to which you can now direct your attention, form the content of your current PSM.”
    Page 303, second paragraph, in the chapter entitled “The Representational Deep Structure of the Phenomenal First-Person Perspective”: “It is important to note that a self-model is an entity spanning many different levels of description. In beings like ourselves, a PSM [Phenomenal Self-Model] will have a true neurobiological description, for example, as a complex neural activation pattern with a specific temporal fine structure, undergoing kaleidoscopic changes from instant to instant. There will also be functional and computational descriptions of the self-model on different levels of granularity. Creating a computational model of the human PSM is one of the most fascinating research goals conceivable. For instance, we might describe it as an activation vector or as a trajectory through some suitable state space. One might even take on a classical cognitivist perspective. Then the self-model could be described as a transient computational module, episodically activated by the system in order to regulate its interaction with the environment. Then there will be the representational level of description, in which the content of the PSM will appear as a complex integration of globally available self-representational, self-simulational, and self-presentational information. ... In introducing the working concept of a PSM I claim that it constitutes a distinct theoretical entity. That is, I claim that it is not only something that can meaningfully be described on a number of different levels of description mirroring each other in a heuristically fruitful manner but that it is something that can be found by suitable empirical research programs. And it can be found on every level of description.”
12. ^ Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Penguin Books UK 1979 or see GoogleScholar.
    This fascinating book, despite its title, is mostly about the functioning of the brain, although it covers many other subjects as well.
    Pages 385 to 387 under the heading “Subsystems”: “There is no reason to expect that 'I', or 'the self', should not be represented by a symbol. In fact, the symbol for the self is probably the most complex of all symbols in the brain. ...it functions almost as an independent 'subbrain', equipped with its own repertoire of symbols which can trigger each other internally. ...'Subsystem' is just another name for an overgrown symbol, one which has gotten so complicated that it has many subsymbols which interact among themselves. Thus, there is no strict level distinction between symbols and subsystems. ...the border is fuzzy.
    
13. ^ Ibid. Godel, Escher, Bach
    Page 387 to 388 under the heading “The self-system and consciousness”, first paragraph: “A very important side effect of the self-subsystem is that it can play the role of 'soul', in the following sense: in communicating constantly with the rest of the subsystems and systems in the brain, it keep track of what symbols are active, and in what way. This means that it has to have symbols for mental activity - in other words, symbols for symbols, and symbols for the actions of symbols. ...this way of describing awareness - as the monitoring of brain activity by a subsystem of the brain itself - seems to resemble the nearly indescribable sensation which we know and call 'consciousness'. ...it seems that the only way one could make sense of the world surrounding a localized animate object is to understand the role of that object in relation to the other objects around it. This necessitates the existence of a self-symbol;”
14. ^ I am a strange loop - Douglas Hofstadter Basic Books 2007 or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 95, under the heading “Where the Buck Seems to Stop”: “The thesis of this book is that in a non-embryonic, non-infantile human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern... that gives rise to what feels like a self.”
    Page 181, under the heading “I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol”: “Accordingly, the 'I' symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.”
    Pages 182-3, under the heading “The Slow Buildup of a Self”: “We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on this basic pedestal, we soon develop a sense for our bodies as flexible physical objects.”

---

Go back to where you last came from or return to the top level summary.

These web pages have no adverts and no cookies, no data is collected or processed so there is no privacy policy, and access is not secure. You are free to use any material on these pages provided it is credited to this site and referenced to the correct page.

The views, opinions and statements in these web pages are my own personal opinions. I am an amateur neuroscientist with no formal training, and I have no accounts on any social media platform. Any comments, corrections or criticisms are welcome, although I don’t guarantee to reply - email me at info@hierarchicalbrain.com.

Page last uploaded Mon Mar 4 08:50:05 2024 MST