Self Comes to Mind

of the maps we know as images, and that a part of that scaling-up process depends on the synchronization of the separate protophenomena, as suggested in Chapter 3 .
    Now, is it enough to combine the microevents of protocognition and synchrony and scale them up across a nested hierarchy distributed within the three neuroanatomical divisions we discussed earlier? In the above account, protocognition from neural microevents is scaled up to the conscious mind, but feeling is omitted. Is there an equivalent “protofeeling” built from neural microevents and scaled up in parallel with protocognition?
    In all the proposals advanced in the previous chapters, feeling was presented as an obligate and founding partner for the conscious mind, but nothing was said about its possible microorigins. As proposed earlier, we obtain spontaneous feelings from the protoself, and those feelings give rise, hybridly, to a first flicker of mind and a first flicker of subjectivity. Later, we invoked feelings of knowing to separate self from nonself and to help generate a proper core self. Eventually, we built an autobiographical self from multiple such feeling components. Feelings were presented as the other side of the cognition coin, but their emergence was placed at the systems level. I invoked the unique, resonantly looped and bonded relationship of brain stem to body, and the exhaustive, recursive combination of body signals in the upper brain stem, as sources of qualitatively distinct body feelings. That may well be sufficient to explain how feelings arise. However, it is reasonable to wonder about an additional feature. If we place the origin of images, in general, at the microlevel, with small neuron circuits generating fragments of protocognition, why should we not accord the special class of images we call feelings the same treatment and have them begin within or close to those same small circuits? In the next section, I suggest that feelings may have such a humble origin. Protofeelings would then be scaled up across nested hierarchies into larger circuitry, in this case the circuitry of the upper-brain-stem tegmentum, where additional processing would result in primordial feelings.
When We Feel Our Perceptions
     
    Anyone interested in the matters of brain, mind, and consciousness has heard of qualia and has an opinion regarding what neuroscience can do about the issue: take it seriously and try to deal with it, or consider it intractable and table it, or dismiss it outright. As the reader can see, I take the issue seriously. But first, given that the concept of qualia is somewhat slippery, let us try to make clear what the issue is. 7
    In the text ahead, qualia is treated as a composite of two problems. In one, qualia refers to the feelings that are an obligate part of any subjective experience—some shade of pleasure or its absence, some shade of pain or discomfort, well-being, or lack thereof. I call this the Qualia I problem. The other problem cuts deeper. If subjective experiences are accompanied by feelings, how are feeling states engendered in the first place? This goes beyond the question of how any experience acquires specific sense qualities in our mind, such as the sound of a cello, the taste of wine, or the blueness of the sea. It addresses a blunter question: Why should the construction of perceptual maps, which are physical, neuro-chemical events, feel like something? Why should they feel like anything at all? This is the Qualia II problem.
Qualia I
     
    No set of conscious images of any kind and on any topic ever fails to be accompanied by an obedient choir of emotions and consequent feelings. As I am looking at the Pacific Ocean dressed in its morning suit, protected by a soft, gray sky, I am not just seeing , I am also emoting to this majestic beauty and feeling a whole array of physiological changes that translate, now that you ask, into a quiet state of well-being. This is happening through no deliberation of mine, and I have no power to prevent the feelings, any more than I had any power to initiate them. They came, they are, and they will stay in some modulation or other, as long as the same conscious object remains in sight and as long as my reflections keep them in some sort of reverberation.
    I like to think of Qualia I as music, as a score that accompanies the remainder of the ongoing mental process, but noting that the performance is within the mental process too. When the main object in my