Eakin states that autobiography is not “something we read in a book,” but is also “a discourse of identity, delivered bit by bit, in the stories we tell ourselves day in and day out” It is also the story we tell others. It is ” an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation”

And then there is the autobiography information about a NBC’s news anchorman. As reported in the NY TIMES on Sunday ” In his newscast on Wednesday, Mr. Williams said he had embellished an account of an incident in 2003; over the years he came to say that he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire, an assertion he now says is not true. He now says he was in a trailing helicopter, and that he “conflated” the two aircraft. He made no mention of the matter during his newscasts on Thursday and Friday.”

What interest me was a psychological term he used “conflated” which I was reintroduced to in, The Story of a Shaking Women , but having a short term memory laps I can’t remember where in the book exactly.

On the other hand, even Wittgenstein criticized Freud’s of conflation regarding is merging   of reasons and causes, or confusing one for the other.

So the question in my mind is regardless of Eakin’s attempts to link autobiography with neurology and Damasio’s arguments about the the narrative being below consciousness I strongly suspect we all on occasion conflate our histories either maliciously, stupidly, or things just get mixed up in our imperfect brains and we just come to believe something be true until somebody questions us.Of course who is to say the person doing the questioning is remembering the right story?

I had never heard of Antonio Damasio before this course, but we seem to have set up shop in a neighborhood where we can’t avoid bumping into him at every corner. A big chunk of the Eakins chapter is devoted to him. His “autobiographical self” notion is mentioned in Hustvedt, and his praise is on her back cover; he and Hustvedt apparently even became friends in the course of her research for The Shaking Woman. We’re reading from two of his books next week. Clearly he is the man of the hour.

So far I’m slightly resistant to him, partly because I was underwhelmed by his TED talk. He began with what seemed to me a false premise, the idea that there are lots of people who think we should not investigate the biological underpinnings of consciousness. (Who are these people? Nineteenth-century philosophers freaked out by Darwinism? Present-day religious conservatives? Politicians who want to cut STEM funding? I can’t imagine he meant his fellow neuroscientists, scientists at large, academics, or anyone in the audience for the talk.) He then went on to say not much of anything that seemed all that new to me. Aren’t most people already aware that there’s a distinction between brain and mind, and between mind and self? That the body and mind are tightly coupled? That we should care about the somatic basis of consciousness because we’re curious, and we want to understand our society and culture, and we want to cure Alzheimer’s disease?

Damasio is a guy you apparently have to grapple with if you want to study consciousness from a neurobiological angle, however, so I’m trying to get a handle on him. Fortunately, his ideas as presented in Eakins are more auspicious than those in the TED talk. Damasio’s book title The Feeling of What Happens is expressive of his notion of consciousness in an almost, dare I say it, literary way, and his theory of self makes sense both biologically and as a description of the lived experience of having a mind:

Self is a feeling, specifically “a feeling of knowing,” “a feeling of what happens.” And what does happen? The body responds to its encounters with objects in its environment, and it also responds to its own changing internal states. And self is Damasio’s name for the feeling of awareness or knowing that these events are taking place.” (Eakins, 68)

Or, as Eakins later helpfully rephrases:

From an evolutionary perspective, self is not some abstract philosophical concept but rather a name for a feeling embedded in the physiological processes necessary for survival. Self, then, for Damasio, is first and last of and about the body; to speak of the embodied self would be redundant, for there is no other. (Eakins, 70)

I’m not sure about Damasio’s idea of consciousness as “the movie-in-the-brain,” where there is “the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie within the movie” – doesn’t this privilege the visual (and, to a lesser extent, the auditory) sense too much above the others in describing the formation of consciousness? And does “appearance” mean that the seeming owner is not real, or not really in ownership of the movie? (I’m also not sure that Eakins’ Damasio-inspired notion of “a moviegoer inside the movie he or she is watching” is exactly “mind-bending”: isn’t there an actual, recent movie in which this very thing has been depicted? Probably something in which Michel Gondry and/or Charlie Kaufman was involved? But I can’t remember the details: time to go do the Joe Brainard exercise.)

Most difficult of all, though, is what Eakins calls the “teller-effect” (his coinage, inspired by Damasio’s concepts). As nearly as I can gather, this is the idea that what we experience as the “narrative” of consciousness is in fact generated by pre-narrative and therefore unnarrateable biological processes; an unnarrateable narrative can have no narrator, so there is only the feeling of a narrative and the illusion of an agent telling it. As to how that plays out in the context of an autobiography, I’ve thus far been unable to translate Eakins’ explanation (“It would be the I-narrative about Pokey and not just the Pokey-character it features that would be the true locus of Mary Karr’s reconstruction of her earlier self”) into non-Barthesian language. Guess I’ll leave that task to my double.

Eakin’s passage begins with a Walt Whitman quote which is as dramatic as the content of his argument about the self.
Eakin offers conjecture coupled with ideas from noted neurobiological thinkers. The content is difficult to fully grasp as much of this chapter relies on work that we have to take his word for, as readers we would need to read the complete text of quoted works or already have a semblance of those works to fully be aware of this complex argument. For me “I” is a suggestion and a spotlight on the actual self making the person the actual focal point. I can be egotistical braggartism which lends to stories full of excitement or I can have more heartfelt emotional content melancholy and dark as in his illustration using Mary Karr’s “The Liars Club: A Memoir”. As for tolerating what is read in an autobiography, he suggest we are all gullible when reading one as autobiographers fabricate much of the content. We are told people “mis-speak”, people are judged to be in a traumatic state when recounting past events incorrectly.
If self happens before birth as suggested genetics and DNA shape our self long before we are born, offering the only true real self prior to contamination of social human influences. Damasio’s theory if founded would serve well as a defense to a serious crime where a disease such as PTSD or any other temporary emotional disorder is said to be the cause for the crime. We can see Damasio’s consciousness theory at play in today’s Reality TV programming and Social Media where individuals augment their persona’s to conspire to a more interesting self. Recently TV in operating rooms and surrounding patients in hospitals has been problematic where families have not been informed and therefore not agreed to the situation, but have complained that the care received by their loved ones has been reduced and undermined because the physician has been more interested in self promotion due to the access TV crews have been allowed.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/12/debate-over-cameras-crew-films-boston/we50wuQ6bUPAU6sFcXA17H/story.html