Interoception / Embodied Feeling

The field studying the sense of the internal state of the body, distinct from exteroception (the senses facing outward) and proprioception (position and movement). A.D. Bud Craig's work on the insular cortex and the lamina I spinothalamic pathway; Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis; Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley on interoceptive accuracy.

RELEVANCE TO THE MEMBRANE ARGUMENT: organs report their own state, and that report is a different channel from their functional output. What the eye SEES and the eye REPORTING ITSELF as hurting are two different things. Systems architecture calls this data plane versus control plane. Beer calls it the algedonic signal.

THE REFINEMENT RENAISSANCE 3.0 ADDS: gut distension, blood gas, osmolarity and inflammatory state are not pain or pleasure at the point of transmission. They are not valenced WHEN SENT. Valence is what they BECOME when they cross into consciousness. Pain and pleasure are therefore not the organ's vocabulary but the EXCHANGE RATE at which any organ's report is admitted to the whole. All interior signals get converted at one counter, and the counter only trades in two currencies.

· 1994– · active · influence 7/10