However, if even the most minor (and from the most remote parts) of the brain stem are missing, the lights go out immediately and completely.
Cortical consciousness depends on brain stem consciousness. Brain stem consciousness is prior to, and is an intrinsic prerequisite for, consciousness.
Dogs and cats can't tell us what they are feeling. However, if you stimulate their brain stems, they will howl, growl, and snarl at you immediately. Brain stem stimulation gets immediate affective responses both good and bad.
Brain stem stimulation, psychopharmacology, neuromodulators, and fMRIs all show the same results: that in all cases feelings come from the brain stem. QED.
The hidden spring is the brain stem. The brain stem has control of the program that runs feelings.
Freud taught us that the bulk of our feelings and cognition are unknown. But there is a logical contradiction here: You cannot have a feeling that you cannot feel. A feeling cannot be anything else. It is an irreducible unit. This is ground-zero for understanding brain activity.
According to the author's "free energy theory" of consciousness, feelings are an extended form of homeostasis. We need them to resist entropy. We must maintain certain physical parameters within a given range, or we die. Feelings are our thermostat.
Whenever these life-threatening parameters deviate from the safe range we feel bad; when they approach the ideal for safe living, we feel better.
Unpleasure is a value that tells us how far we are getting from the safety-zone. Feelings, kick-start our Bayesian prediction system.
It is the valence that allows us to make choices; that is the foundation of our value system. We feel our way into our value system. They allow us to survive novel situations.
To understand consciousness, we must understand feelings.
Freud told us that ego learns about the external world from the senses and that it controlled the id, but the opposite is true: The id is conscious, not the ego. Drives are felt. The ego borrows its consciousness from the id. The id is always conscious. It cannot not be conscious. Think about it: if the id is not conscious where is the unconscious?
Proof that the cortex can do its job without consciousness is the flash card demonstration that occurs so quickly that a person is unaware that his brain has been hijacked, and that it has registered the flashed card without his knowledge.
The most spectacular of such examples is the Magician who flashed a deck of cards on TV and told the audience, including me, to pick a card. The whole world picked the Queen of Diamonds, because, the deck was shuffled just so that the Queen of Diamonds flashed a fraction of a millisecond slower than the others. I was flabbergasted when my card, the Queen of Diamonds, was shown as his selection.
The author's account of consciousness unites elementary physics with the neuroscience of subjective experiences traditionally explored by psychoanalysis. And then he unmistakably relocates the center of brain functioning in the brain stem instead of in the frontal cortex. He also proves that feelings are a required evolutionary development of all living mammals. A fabulous read. Five stars
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