Monday Quote Cogitation #2 - Damasio

Thinking about consciousness… Antonio Damasio has been pitching a theory of consciousness (e.g., in The Feeling of What Happens) grounded in the idea that, when the brain responds to the outside world, it not only maps the phenomenon, but also maps its own response to the phenomenon. The brain tracks all the physiological phenomena of the body – not just sense data, but status of muscles and electrolyte balance and so forth. The brain’s consideration of this basic body state becomes the core sense of self.

In Looking for Spinoza, this idea leads to what strikes me as a physiological basis for the Aristotelian concept of eudaemonia:

[T]here are organism states in which the regulation of life processes becomes efficient, or even optimal, free-flowing and easy. This is a well-established physiological fact. It is not a hypothesis. The feelings that usually accompany such physiologically conducive states are deemed ‘positive,’ characterized not just by absence of pain but by varieties of pleasure. There also are organism states in which life processes struggle for balance and can even be chaotically out of control. The feelings that usually accompany such states are deemed ‘negative,’ characterized not just by absence of pleasure but by varieties of pain.