In search of the ego
What, not where, is the ego is the relevant question. It has no location. I’m working on a definition – it still needs work, but here it is so far.
Ego: the state of a salient feeling of one’s total isolation from others. This state is necessary in moments of imminent individual threat (it simplifies the informational confusion into a functional packet) but acts only to isolate one dangerously from others when the threat is exaggerated or wholly imaginary. Under those conditions, all manner of evil can be let loose upon society or one’s loved ones. Ego feelings can emerge in wholly non-threatening circumstances, but the state of perceived threat is always a component part of the phenomenon. Its salience can vary but not vanish. The ego is not “in” the brain but is “of” the brain-body system in which signals loop into a configuration of conscious unifying value to the organism, tightening the strings and pulling it together, so to speak. The message being spun around the loop is: me against all else. Bring the wagons into a circle. It is not an existential gestalt but rather a shift of figure and ground analogous to the experience of an optical illusion. Our actual existential gestalt is defined by body within environment (all that surrounds the body that is not explicitly it), or being in the world (Heidegger’s working model). That brings our unit of being into a necessary social and physical inclusion.
A state of feeling has varying and shifting degrees of salience and is not in a single location, but is a systemic emergence from a congeries of signals in a certain relation to each other designating one’s condition of the moment that emerges from the homeostatic state of the organism. Oxygen, nutrition, and underlying perceived safety are factors in maintaining optimal homeostatic flow. The feeling we feel, positive or negative, is a function of that measurement, working to motivate, consciously or unconsciously, actions to return the dynamic as close to equilibrium as possible (which cannot be fully attained or else we would be dead).
