Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.

If we were to remove the conscious component from our ongoing mental states, you and I would still have images flowing in our minds, but those images would be unconnected to us as singular individuals. The images would not be owned by you or me or anyone else. They would flow unmoored. No one would know to whom such images belonged. Sisyphus would be fine. He is a tragic figure only because he knows that the abominable predicament is his.

In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.By now we should be clear about the origin of feelings. Feelings arise in the interior of organisms, in the depth of viscera and fluids where the chemistry responsible for life in all its aspects reigns supreme. I am talking about the operations of the endocrine and immune and circulatory systems, in charge of metabolism and defense.

The trajectory behind the process of feeling is clear: a multitude of basic micro-messages travel from body tissues and organs either to (a) circulating blood and from there to the nervous system or, directly, to (b) nerve terminals embedded in body tissues and organs. Once the signals arrive in the central nervous system—in the spinal cord and the brain stem, for example—they face a number of possible roads that lead to varied neural centers where the feeling process can be advanced further. Ultimately, such complicated signal trajectories result in the production of informative mental images. The images, such as, for example, a dry mouth, a growling stomach, or the mere lack of energy signaled by weakness, operate as indicators of trouble. They are accompanied by worry and discomfort—an emotive state—which in turn motivate a response, in the form of a corrective action.

All living organisms, no matter how small, have the ability to detect—or “sense”—sensory stimuli. Examples of sensory stimuli include light, heat, cold, vibration, a poke. Organisms can also respond to what is sensed, and the response is aimed at either the environment that surrounds them or the interior of their body as defined by the cellular membrane that contains it.

Consciousness, then, is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution. The operations of the body’s interior signaled via the interoceptive nervous system contribute the feeling component, while other operations within the central nervous system contribute imagery describing the world around the organism as well as its musculoskeletal frame. These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.

Feelings collect information about the state of life within the organism, and the “qualities and intensities” that are manifested by feelings constitute valuations of the process of managing life. They are direct expressions of the degree of success or failure of the life enterprise within our body. Keeping alive is an uphill battle, and our bodies engage in a complicated and multicentric effort to make life not only possible but robustly so.

Sometimes popular wisdom beats laborious science. That feelings are not purely mental; that they are hybrids of mind and body; that they move with ease from mind to body and back again; and that they disturb the mental peace, those are the points of the song and my points in this chapter. All I need to add is that the power of feelings comes from the fact that they are present in the conscious mind: technically speaking, we feel because the mind is conscious, and we are conscious because there are feelings! I am not playing with words; I am merely stating the seemingly paradoxical but very real facts. Feelings were and are the beginning of an adventure called consciousness.

Covert intelligences solve problems simply and economically. Explicit intelligence's are complicated. They require feeling and consciousness. They have made organisms fare for the struggle and, in the process, invented new ways to do so.

In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses.

We need to assert that self-reference is not an optional feature of feeling but a defining, indispensable one. And we can venture further: we can declare feeling a foundational component of standard consciousness.

Any theory that bypasses the nervous system in order to account for the existence of minds and consciousness is destined to failure. The nervous system is the critical contributor to the realisation of minds, consciousness, and the creative reasoning that they allow. But any theory that relies exclusively on the nervous system to account for minds and consciousness is also bound to fail.

Because the actual object of the feeling/perception is none other than a part of the organism itself, that object is in fact located within the subject/perceiver. Astonishing! Nothing comparable occurs with our external perceptions, for example, visual or auditory. The objects of visual or auditory perceptions do not communicate with our bodies. The landscape we see or the songs we hear are not in touch with our bodies, let alone inside them. They exist in a physically separate space.

The neural activity patterns that correspond to our surround are first concocted by sensory organs such as our eyes, our ears, or the tactile corpuscles in our skin. The sensory organs work with the central nervous system, where nuclei in regions such as the spinal cord and the brain stem assemble the signals collected by the sensory organs. Eventually, after a few more intermediate stations, the cerebral cortices receive and organize the perceptual signals. Thanks to the pioneering work of physiologists such as David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, we know that the result of this setup is the construction of maps of objects and of their territories, in varied sensory modalities, for example, sight, hearing, touch. The maps are the basis for the images we experience in our minds.1

The consequences of consciousness for humans have been remarkably larger in scope and reach. Note that this is not because the core mechanisms of consciousness are different in humans—I believe they are not—but because the intellectual resources of humans are so much taller and wider. Those larger resources have enabled humans to respond to the polar experiences of suffering or of pleasure by inventing new objects, actions, and ideas, which have translated into the creation of cultures.1

The manifest ownership of mental contents by the integrated organism where they arise is the distinctive trait of a conscious mind.

We must be careful when we use the notion of mapping in relation to our own body and to the making of feelings, as if the maps were a pure “reflection” or “picture” of the body structure and state, yet another example of a detached percept. Our feelings are not detached at all. In practice, there is little distance between feelings and the things felt. Feelings are commingled with the things and events we feel thanks to the exceptional and intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system. This intimacy, in turn, is itself a product of the peculiarities of the system charged with signaling from the body into the nervous system, that is, the interoceptive system.1

Feelings owe their existence to the fact that the nervous system has direct contact with our insides and vice versa. The nervous system literally “touches” the organism’s interior, everywhere in that interior, and it is “touched” in return. The nakedness of the interior relative to the nervous system and the direct access the nervous system enjoys relative to that interior are part of the uniqueness of interoception, the technical term reserved for the perception of our visceral interior. Interoception is distinct from the perception of our musculoskeletal system, known as proprioception, and from the perception of the outside world, or exteroception. We can obviously use words to describe the experiences of feeling, but we do not need the mediation of words in order to feel.2 Feelings, as enacted in our organism and experienced in our minds, exert a tug and a pull over us, literally disturb us, positively or negatively.

To be sure, nonhumans have succeeded in evading or mitigating causes of pain and suffering but, for example, have not been able to modify their origins. The consequences of consciousness for humans have been remarkably larger in scope and reach. Note that this is not because the core mechanisms of consciousness are different in humans—I believe they are not—but because the intellectual resources of humans are so much taller and wider. Those larger resources have enabled humans to respond to the polar experiences of suffering or of pleasure by inventing new objects, actions, and ideas, which have translated into the creation of cultures.1

The earliest physiological source of feelings is an integrated chemical profile of the organism’s interior. It is likely that such a molecular-level source was present in evolution prior to the appearance of nervous systems. But this is not to say that simple organisms devoid of nervous systems would have been (or are) capable of mental experiences, beginning with the experience of feelings. Feelings reflect a chemical regulatory process, the initial condition without which they could not occur, but another condition must be met, and that is a dialogue between body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons in a nervous system.

Emotions: collections of co-occurring and involuntary internal actions (for example, smooth muscle contractions, changes in heart rate, breathing, hormonal secretions, facial expressions, posture) triggered by perceptual events. The emotive actions are usually aimed at supporting homeostasis, for instance, countering threats (with fear or anger) or signaling successful states (with joy). When we recall events from memory, we also produce emotions. Feelings: the mental experiences that follow and accompany varied states of organism homeostasis, whether primary (homeostatic feelings such as hunger and thirst, pain or pleasure) or provoked by emotions (emotional feelings such as fear, anger, and joy).

Once we are capable of consciousness, what we become conscious of is the contents of our minds.

Figuratively, feelings do not take simple snapshots of external objects or events; feelings tape the whole show and the backstage activity, not just the surfaces, but also what is underneath.

Feelings provide organisms with experiences of their own life. Specifically, they provide the owner organism with a scaled assessment of its relative success of living, a natural examination grade that comes in the form of quality—pleasant or unpleasant, light or intense. This is precious and novel information, the kind of information that organisms confined to the "being" stage cannot comprehend.

The consequences of these peculiarities are remarkable. Lack of myelin insulation and lack of blood-brain barrier allow signals from the body to interact with neural signals directly. In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.

Bacteria around us and within us are endowed with a non-explicit competence that allows them to govern their lives not just efficiently but intelligently. The same happens with plants. Their intelligence concerns unstated goals, namely, survive always and flourish often. Bacteria and plants operate as they “should,” according to the imperatives of life regulation (or homeostasis), but they do so blindly—by which I mean that they do not know why or how they do what they do.

The operations of interior organs and systems are gradually represented in the nervous system, first in its peripheral nerve components, then in nuclei of the central nervous system (in the brain stem, for example), and later in the cerebral cortex. But there is an intense cooperation between body parts and neural elements. Body and nervous system remain interactive partners rather than separate “model” and “depiction.” What is ultimately imaged is neither purely neural nor purely bodily. It emerges from a dialogue, from a dynamic give-and-take between body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons.

People often speak of algorithms with reverence, with the respect appropriately owed to the sort of scientific or technical development that has changed lives. The reverence and the respect are well justified, but it is important to understand the nature of algorithms and be clear about their limits especially when we compare them to images. One should think of algorithms as recipes, as the way to prepare Wiener schnitzel or, as Michel Serres has suggested, tarte tatin.1 Recipes are helpful, of course, but they are not the thing that the recipes are meant to help you reach. You cannot taste a recipe of Wiener schnitzel or savor a recipe for tarte tatin. Thanks to your mind, you can anticipate the tastes and salivate accordingly, but given a recipe alone, you cannot really savor a nonexistent product. When people think of “uploading or downloading their minds” and becoming immortal, they should realize that their adventure—in the absence of live brains in live organisms—would consist in transferring recipes, and only recipes, to a computer device. Following the argument to its conclusion, they would not gain access to the actual tastes and smells of the real cooking and of the real food.

The state and quality of the actual objects and actions of the interior are the stars. It is not the actual violins or trumpets that steal the show; it is the sounds they make.

In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses. The controls are located in the diencephalon, a sector of the central nervous system located below the cerebral cortex and above the brain stem and spinal cord. The region in charge of this immune control is known as the hypothalamus, a famed orchestrator of the endocrine system that governs the secretion of most hormones throughout the body.