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The Self
"The human self is a self-organizing, interactive system of thoughts, feelings, and motives that characterizes an individual. It gives rise to an enduring experience of physical and psychological existence--a phenomenological sense of constancy and predictability. The self is reflexive and dynamic in nature: responsive yet stable." (Self and Identity in Everyday Life <http://www.psych.neu.edu/ISSI/daily.htm>) Our existence as self conscious beings rests upon the function of the central nervous system, which is composed of about 100 billion individual cells. Only humans have an abstract conception of who they are and how they fit into the ultimate scheme of things. The self is a relatively recent adaptation, perhaps only thirty thousand years old. Once the concept of the self had evolved, the concept of the inevitable destruction of the self, with the death of the body was inevitable. This gave rise to a new drive, generative death anxiety, as a result of the conflict between the survival instinct and the knowledge of one's own eventual death. While tool use had existed among both human and other higher animals, it was only about thirty thousand years ago that we see the cultural explosion. Its first signs were flowers on graves and other symbolic expressions related to funeral ceremonies. Cultural evolution has been the major force in human development since that time. The built environment, the arts and sciences, domesticated plants and animals, and the meanings attached to them are a result of cultural evolution.
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