Self Comes to Mind

Qualia I problem: if feelings regarding the organism’s state are the obligate accompaniment of all perceptual maps, then we must first explain the origin of those very feelings.
    The front line of the explanation takes into consideration some critical facts. Feeling states first arise from the operation of a few brain-stem nuclei that are highly interconnected among themselves and that are the recipients of highly complex, integrated signals transmitted from the organism’s interior. In the process of using body signals to regulate life, the activity of the nuclei transforms those body signals. The transformation is further enhanced by the fact that the signals occur in a looped circuit whereby the body communicates to the central nervous system and the latter responds to the body’s messages. The signals are not separable from the organism states where they originate. The ensemble constitutes a dynamic, bonded unit. I hypothesize that this unit enacts a functional fusion of body states and perceptual states, such that the dividing line between the two can no longer be drawn. Neurons in charge of conveying to the brain signals about the body’s interior would have such an intimate association with interior structures that the signals conveyed would not be merely about the state of the flesh but literally extensions of the flesh. Neurons would imitate life so thoroughly that they would become one with it. In brief, in the complex interconnectivity of these brain-stem nuclei, one would find the beginning of an explanation for why feelings—in this case, primordial feelings—feel like something.
    However, as I suggested in the previous section, perhaps we can attempt to go deeper into the small neuron circuit level. The fact that neurons are differentiations of other living cells, both functionally distinct and yet organically similar, gives this idea a foothold. Neurons are not microchips receiving signals from the body. The sensory neurons charged with interoception are body cells of a specialized kind receiving signals from other body cells. Moreover, there are aspects of cell life that suggest the presence of forerunners of a “feeling” function. Unicellular organisms are “sensitive” to threatening intrusions. Poke an amoeba, and it will shrink away from the poke. Poke a paramecium, and it will swim away from the poke. We can observe such behaviors and are comfortable to describe them as “attitudes,” knowing full well that the cells do not know what they are doing in the sense that we know what we do when we evade a threat. But what about the other side of this behavior, namely, the cell’s internal state? The cell does not have a brain, let alone a mind to “feel” the pokes, and yet it responds because something changed in its interior. Transpose the situation to neurons, and therein could reside the physical state whose modulation and amplification, via larger and larger circuits of cells, could yield a protofeeling , the honorable counterpart of the protocognition that arises at the same level.
    Neurons do have such response capabilities. Take, for example, their inherent “sensitivity” or “irritability.” Rodolfo Llinás has used this clue to propose that feelings arise from the specialized sensory functions of neurons but scaled up to the large number of neurons that are part of a circuit. 8 This is my argument as well, similar to the idea I advanced in Chapter 2 regarding the building of a “collective will to live,” as expressed in the self process, from the attitudes of numerous single cells joined cooperatively in an organism. Such an idea draws on the notion of the summing up of cellular contributions: large numbers of muscular cells join forces, literally, by contracting simultaneously and producing a major singular and focused force.
    There are intriguing nuances to this idea. The specialization of neurons relative to other body cells comes, in good part, from the fact that neurons, along with muscle cells, are excitable. Excitability is a property that derives from a cell membrane in which local permeability for charged ions is allowed to travel from region to region over the distance of an axon. N. D. Cook suggests that the temporary but repeated opening up of the cell membrane is a violation of the nearly hermetic seal that protects life in the neuron’s interior and that such vulnerability would be a good candidate for the creation of a moment of protofeeling. 9
    I am