Self Comes to Mind

consciousness is not the ocean but an actual music piece, then there are two musical tracks going in my mind, one with the Bach piece that is playing right now and another with the music-like track with which I react to the actual music in the language of emotion and feeling. That is none other than Qualia I for a musical performance—call it music on music. Perhaps polyphonic music was inspired by an intuition of this accumulation of parallel “musical” lines in one’s mind.
    In a small range of real-life situations, the obligate Qualia I accompaniment may be reduced or even fail to materialize. The most benign would come from the effect of any drug capable of shutting down emotional responsivity—think of a tranquilizer like Valium, an antidepressant like Prozac, or even a β blocker such as propranolol, all of which, given enough dosage, dampen one’s ability to respond emotionally and consequently to experience emotional feelings.
    Emotional feelings also fail to materialize in a common pathological situation, depression, in which aspects of positive feeling are notoriously absent and in which even negative feelings such as sadness may be dampened so severely that the result is an affectively blunted state.
    How does the brain produce the requisite Qualia I effect? As we saw in Chapter 5 , in parallel with the devices of perception that map any object you may wish, and in parallel with the regions, which display such maps, the brain is equipped with a variety of structures that respond to signals from those maps by producing emotions, out of which arise subsequent feelings. Examples of such hot-button regions include structures we encountered earlier: the famous amygdala; an almost-as-famous part of the prefrontal cortex known as the ventromedial sector; and an array of nuclei in the basal forebrain and the brain stem.
    The way emotions are triggered is intriguing, as we saw earlier. The image-making regions can signal to any of the emotion-triggering regions, directly or after further processing. If the configuration of signals fits the profile that a given region is wired to respond to—that is, if it qualifies as an emotionally competent stimulus—the result is the triggering of a cascade of events, enacted in other parts of the brain and, subsequently, in the body itself, the result of which is an emotion. The perceptual readout of the emotion is a feeling.
    The secret behind my composite experience of this moment is the brain’s capacity to respond to the same content (say, my image of the Pacific Ocean) at different sites and in parallel . From one brain site I get the emotional process that culminates in a feeling of well-being; from other brain sites I get several ideas about today’s weather (the sky does not have quite the typical marine layer; it has more of a cotton fluff appearance, an uneven set of clouds) or about the sea (it can have imposing majesty or welcoming openness depending on the light and the wind, not to mention one’s own mood), and so forth.
    A normal conscious state usually contains a number of objects to be known, rarely one, and it treats them in a more or less integrated fashion, although hardly ever in the democratic style that would accord equal conscious space and equal time to every object. The fact that different images have different values results in uneven image enhancements. In turn, the uneven enhancement generates an “ordering” of images best described as a spontaneous form of editing. Part of the process of according different values to different images relies on the emotions they provoke and the feelings that ensue in the background of the conscious field—the subtle but not discardable Qualia I response. This is why, although the qualia issue is traditionally regarded as part of the consciousness problem, I believe it belongs more appropriately under the mind rubric. Qualia I responses concern objects being processed in mind and add another element to the mind. I do not regard the Qualia I problem as a mystery.
Qualia II
     
    The Qualia II problem centers on the more perplexing question: why should perceptual maps, which are neural and physical events, feel like anything at all? To attempt a layered answer, begin by focusing on the feeling state that I regard as simultaneous foundation of mind and self, namely, the primordial feelings that describe the state of the organism’s interior. I need to start here because of the proposed solution for the