Self Comes to Mind

shared.
    As organisms evolved, the programs underlying homeostasis became more complex, in terms of the conditions that prompted their engagement and the range of results. Those more complex programs gradually became what we now know as drives, motivations, and emotions (see Chapter 5 ).
    In brief, homeostasis needs help from drives and motivations, which complex brains provide abundantly, deployed with the help of anticipation and prediction and played out in the exploration of environments. Humans certainly have the most advanced motivational system, complete with endless curiosity, a keen scouting drive, and sophisticated warning systems regarding future needs, all meant to keep us on the good side of the railroad tracks.
Connecting Homeostasis, Value, and Consciousness
     
    What we have come to designate as valuable, in terms of goods or actions, is directly or indirectly related to the possibility of maintaining a homeostatic range in the interior of living organisms. Moreover, we know that certain sectors and configurations within the homeostatic range are associated with optimal life regulation, while others are less efficient, and others still are closer to the danger zone. The danger zone is that within which disease and death can set in. It stands to reason that goods and actions that, in one way or another, will ultimately induce optimal life regulation will be regarded as most valuable. 9
    We already know how humans diagnose the optimal sector of the homeostatic range, without any need to have one’s blood chemistries measured in a medical lab. The diagnosis requires no special expertise but merely the fundamental process of consciousness: optimal ranges express themselves in the conscious mind as pleasurable feelings; dangerous ranges, as not-so-pleasant or even painful feelings .
    Can one imagine a more transparent detection system? Optimal workings of an organism, which result in efficient, harmonious states of life, constitute the very substrate of our primordial feelings of well-being and pleasure. They are the foundation of the state that, in quite elaborate settings, we call happiness. On the contrary, disorganized, inefficient, inharmonious life states, the harbingers of disease and system failure, constitute the substrate of negative feelings, of which, as Tolstoy observed so accurately, there are far more varieties than of the positive kind—an infinite assortment of pains and suffering, not to mention disgust, fears, anger, sadness, shame, guilt, and contempt.
    As we shall see, the defining aspect of our emotional feelings is the conscious readout of our body states as modified by emotions; that is why feelings can serve as barometers of life management. This is also why, not surprisingly, feelings have been influencing societies and cultures and all their workings and artifacts ever since they became known to human beings. But long before the dawn of consciousness and the emergence of conscious feelings, in fact even before the dawn of minds as such, the configuration of chemical parameters was already influencing individual behaviors in simple creatures without brains to represent those parameters. This is quite sensible: unminded organisms had to rely on chemical parameters to guide the actions required to maintain their lives. This “blind” guidance encompassed considerably elaborate behaviors. The growth of different kinds of bacteria in a colony is guided by such parameters and can even be described in social terms: colonies of bacteria routinely practice “quorum sensing” within their group and literally engage in warfare in order to hold on to territory and resources. They do that even inside our own bodies as they fight for real estate privileges in our throats or in our guts. But as soon as very simple nervous systems came on the scene, social behaviors were even more apparent. Consider the nematode, a polite name for a scientifically fetching kind of worm whose social behaviors are quite sophisticated.
    The brain of a nematode, such as C. elegans , has a mere 302 neurons organized in a chain of ganglia—nothing to be very proud of. Like any other living creature, nematodes need to feed themselves to survive. Depending on the scarcity or abundance of food and on environmental threats, they can come to the trough, as it were, more or less gregariously. They feed alone if food is available and the environment is quiet; but if food is scarce or if they detect a threat in the