TITLE:
How Do We Have Feelings?
AUTHORS:
Irving C. Statler
KEYWORDS:
Experiential Consciousness, Feelings, Mind-Body Problem, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Neuropharmacology
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science,
Vol.5 No.11,
October
9,
2015
ABSTRACT: For
centuries, the question of how a physical structure (the brain) generates the
subjective feeling of consciousness has plagued neuroscientists, physiologists,
psychologists, linguists, and philosophers. This has become known as the “hard problem of consciousness” and has been the subject of many publications. Although
lots of answers have been proposed, none has been completely satisfactory. The
focus of most of these studies has been on the neuronal structures and
activities. Experiential consciousness emerges from neural processes, but it
has not been explained with models that have been based solely on the
electro-mechanical aspects of the processes. There must be some other dynamic
features of neuronal activity to explain the emergence of experiential consciousness.
I argue that a likely answer to the dilemma resides in the added dimension of
the neurochemistry of the brain that has, so far, received little attention.