We name ourselves and there is a uniqueness in the naming. We are separated off from all other creatures, etc., and that’s when with the sense of “I”. There are many cultures where they don’t use “I” very much, especially in Aboriginal cultures, but there is a sense of “I” in the sense of recognizing that they are a unique individual, perhaps very closely tied to the group and perhaps all of their behavioral characteristics very, very much modified by their inclusion within the group.
It’s hard in the world of cold blooded creatures, or early vertebra life forms, to see a self in a neural sense emerging because it’s essentially a one dimensional world, if you will. It doesn’t have the inner dimension of a developed limbic system and it has very, very limited abstracting and capacity. So whatever a sense of self is we certainly can’t put ourselves in that position so it’s kind of imagination on our part too to try and get back in there. But it certainly would have to be immensely diminished, diminished for instance compared to what we see emerging in the mammalian life when with the limbic system in placed in the past, growing and developing and becoming more and more influential relative to the present, clearly a sense of self, and I say a sense of self, not a self but a sense of self emerges as the end result of the neural processing. We see this in our pets. We recognize the clear personality differences between them and so they have a clear sense of themselves as a creature. How individuated that is, that again is very debatable. When we get to the third brain, only man says “I” and I think that obviously there is something of a really profound significance there and most of the time its rare for a child to say “I” until about the age of three and a half or four years old. I can remember my children, all refer to themselves, Cheryl wants this or whatever, they would speak of themselves as if there was something outside but they didn’t use the word “I” in spite of the fact that the parents and everybody else, all the other adults, are using “I” all the time. So there’s an interesting question, what is it that the child doesn’t have relative to its sense that leads it not to use that term at all? That’s why I call this “I” that emerges that we speak from as a sense of “I”. It is not “I” in any individuated sense beyond that, we think that’s appropriate in looking at this way, but clearly there is a sense of “I” and that’s again, the result of neural processes that involve all three brains. We are three dimensional in that sense for ourselves and that uniqueness places us in this three dimensional world we identify as “I”. We name ourselves and there is a uniqueness in the naming. We are separated off from all other creatures, etc., and that’s when with the sense of “I”. There are many cultures where they don’t use “I” very much, especially in Aboriginal cultures, but there is a sense of “I” in the sense of recognizing that they are a unique individual, perhaps very closely tied to the group and perhaps all of their behavioral characteristics very, very much modified by their inclusion within the group. We see this in Indian populations even in the United States today where there isn’t any clear sense of separation of that “I” from the group but there is still a sense of “I”.
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