Damasio’s Homeostatic Feelings and Emergence of Consciousness

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's perspective on consciousness is distinctive in a variety of ways. Crucially, the root process behind consciousness, he argues, is that of feelings related to the interior of complex organisms endowed with nervous systems. These feelings, which Damasio calls “homeostatic” to distinguish them from the feelings of emotions, continuously represent the ongoing state of the life of an organism in terms of how close or how far that state is from ideal, that ideal being homeostasis (Damasio & Damasio, 2023, 2024; Damasio, 1999).

Interoception and Homeostatic Feelings

Neuroanatomically, the homeostatic feeling representations are achieved by the interoceptive system, which collects signals—via interoceptive axons in peripheral nerves and spinal and brainstem nuclei—from the entire spectrum of viscera, from smooth musculature to end organs.

Interoception is distinct from exteroception in a number of ways, but quite importantly because it pertains to an internal, animated landscape. Feelings represent evolving, active states, but the “describer”—the nervous system—happens to be located inside the organism being “described,” with the consequence that the describer and described can interact.

Moreover, the interaction is facilitated by the fact that the interoceptive nervous system is especially open, given its primitive nature, which includes neurons without myelin, whose axons are open to receiving signals at any point in their course, away from synapses (Damasio & Damasio, 2023, 2024).

Other reasons why homeostatic feelings are distinct, according to Damasio, include (1) the fact that they are naturally, spontaneously, informative; and (2) that the information they provide is used to adjust the life process such that it may best correspond to ideal conditions.

In brief, homeostatic feelings are regulatory because their spontaneous consciousness is used to achieve homeostasis and guarantee the continuation of life. Homeostatic feelings are the natural source of experiences. When they are combined with images generated by exteroceptive channels such as vision, they produce subjectivity.

Core Phenomena of Consciousness

Thus, according to Damasio, homeostatic feelings are the core phenomena of consciousness. They are spontaneously conscious processes of a hybrid nature, combining mental features and bodily features. Their presence informs the rest of the mind, e.g., the images that correspond to current perceptions or to perceptions retrieved from memory, that (1) life is ongoing inside a specific body/organism, and that (2) the life process is (or is not) operating within a range conducive to the continuation of life. Feelings offer spontaneous guidance on this specific issue and are thus a key to life regulation and survival (Damasio & Damasio, 2023, 2024).

Damasio recounts that “the approach to the nature and physiology of consciousness has taken two distinct paths. One of those paths, by far the most frequent, has tied consciousness to cognitive processes, mainly exteroception, and most prominently, to vision. The other path has related consciousness to affective processes, specifically to feeling. ‘The cognitive path’ has seen consciousness as a complex and late arrival in biological history. It culminates in cognition writ large, e.g., exteroceptive processes, memory, reasoning, symbolic languages, and creativity. The ‘affect path’ has located the emergence of consciousness far earlier in biological history, and interoceptive processes provide the key” (Damasio & Damasio, 2021, 2023, 2024; Damasio, 2019).

In making his argument, Damasio explains “how and why consciousness entered biology through the avenue of affect. The feelings that translate fundamental homeostatic states—hunger, thirst, malaise, pain, well-being, desire—offer organisms a new layer of life regulation because of their inherent conscious status. Consciousness spontaneously delivers valuable knowledge into the decision-making mental space. Consciousness allows organisms to act deliberately and knowingly, rather than acting or failing to act automatically and blindly. Consciousness is what makes deliberate life regulation possible. The intrinsic conscious nature of feelings is their grace and was their passport into natural selection. Their conscious nature is not a neutral trait.”

Damasio assumes that “the emergence of consciousness occurred when homeostatic feelings first arose, there and then, and naturally provided knowledge concerning life” (Damasio, 2019, 2021).