Is what I’m conscious of.
You dig?
Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio’s brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of “images” that map aspects of the world around us. But these images, by themselves, cannot be conscious. For that, they must be related to a perspective, an “owner,” a self — this, after all, is what subjectivity means. And here is where feeling comes in. As Damasio uses the term, “feelings” are “the hybrid, interactive processes of the interior, at once mental and physical.” They register how well or badly its various subsystems are doing at maintaining homeostasis, at keeping the organism alive and flourishing. So feelings point within, to the interior; images point without, to the world. And when feelings and images come together in the brain, the result is conscious thought. To adapt a simile of Damasio’s, feelings are like a musical score that, when added to the silent reel of images in the mind, produces cinematic consciousness.
Is It Possible to Explain How Consciousness Works? New York Times, November 2, 2021
ONE SONG ETERNAL
During that half-measured beat of our lives
for Heaven, we look upward to Sky
for Hell, downward to Earth
All whilst desperately,
dependently, desirously
existing within an infinitely
expanding Universe –
our One Song Eternal –
a Rhythmical Void void
of Direction
of Time
A Void where that which we seek
be it that Heaven or that Hell
can only be found within
that Composition of
our Mind
∞
