"What Lies Beneath The Self" Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 136):

With this view of higher-order consciousness, it is possible to see roughly what lies beneath the self that connects phonology to semantics in a naming sentence. Once a self is developed through social and linguistic interactions on a base of primary consciousness, a world is developed that requires naming and intending. This world reflects inner events that are recalled, and imagined events, as well as outside events that are perceptually experienced. Tragedy becomes possible — the loss of the self by death or mental disorder, the remembrance of unassuageable pain. By the same token, a high drama of creation and endless imagination emerges.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the self of higher-order consciousness arises through the enactment of intersubjective relations as the interpersonal meaning of language; and this arises simultaneously with the construal of experience as ideational meaning of language — the transformation of the meaningless into a "world" of meaning.

Such meaning constitutes the content of consciousness: the phenomena of mental processes of perception, cognition (including remembering and imagining), desideration and emotion that unfold through a senser.  Through mental processes of cognition, thoughts/propositions can be projected into semiotic existence; through mental processes of desideration, wishes/proposals can be projected into semiotic existence.  Through verbal processes, such projected meanings can be exchanged with others in the form of wording.

The loss of each self is the loss of a world of meaning.  As Laurie Anderson observed in World Without End

When my father died it was like a whole library had burned down