One of the more intriguing aspects of recent artificial intelligence debates is how AI researchers, by asserting that some tools might be conscious, sparked a broader conversation about the nature of consciousness itself. Humans have probably always reflected on the phenomenon of consciousness. In recorded history, it began primarily in ancient Western philosophy as inquiries into the nature of the soul, with thinkers like Plato and Aristotle exploring the relationship between the mental and the physical. This dualistic framework gained modern articulation in the seventeenth century through René Descartes, who famously posited a strict division between immaterial minds and material bodies. Following Descartes, seventeenth and eighteenth-century empiricists and rationalists debated how sensory input transforms into subjective experience and personal identity. In the twentieth century, the philosophy of mind experienced a resurgence driven by advances in cognitive science, neuroscience, and analytic philosophy. Philosophers shifted away from pure introspection toward investigating how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective awareness. Contemporary discussions center on persistent challenges, such as the debate over whether physical brain processes alone can account for subjective awareness, a view known as physicalism, or whether mental states are better understood by the functional roles they perform within a system, an approach called functionalism.
These theories struggle to solve the core puzzle of how personal experience arises from objective matter, leaving open the question of whether physical science can ever fully explain why conscious states feel like anything at all. When a problem domain remains non-falsifiable, speculation naturally steps in to fill the gap. Without evidence, theories have room to roam, ranging from far-out physics to pure philosophy or spiritual ideas.
Philosopher Jerry Fodor said, “Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.” Indeed, many questions that began as philosophy have been settled by science. Debates about motion and the cosmos turned into physics through observation and math, while theories about the nature of matter were settled by atomic chemistry. Likewise, philosophical speculation on the origin of life shifted to biology after the discovery of evolution and genetics.
As humans, we inherently understand that there is something that feels like being and experiencing our lives in time. When we commune with other animals, we may sense that they too experience this phenomenon. Conscious experience is inherently given to me and involves an experienced self — “me-ness.” The challenge with consciousness is that the natural sciences deal with the objective 3rd-person perspective. Conscious experience, however, relates to the first-person perspective—specifically, a phenomenon we all recognize through direct subjective experience, yet struggle to measure. This often makes discourse challenging. In recent years, several theories of consciousness have been developed that provide functional frameworks for explaining consciousness, yet almost all remain in the 3rd person perspective. Among those theories are the integrated information theory (IIT), the global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT), and the predictive coding theory (PCT).
While these types of theories are interesting, plausible, and useful constructs, they remain scientifically non-falsifiable. What strikes me as odd, however, is that they all lack—or take for granted—the dimension of time. This is despite the fact that consciousness, as we experience it, is a continuous flow of events occurring in the felt present moment of an embodied being.
I’m not sure why western thinking remains with one foot in variants of mind-body dualism. I question whether we are confusing intelligence and cognition with something far more primitive and fundamental to organic life—a trait that is not uniquely human but likely extends deep into the animal kingdom. We may draw arbitrary boundaries between sentience and consciousness or view them on a spectrum, but what if sentience itself is primary, merely an evolutionary adaptation to basic biological function that doesn’t overlay neatly onto other non-biological systems? As much as I love science fiction and speculating about the mystical dimensions of existence, isn’t this the more probable explanation from a Bayesian perspective—one grounded in what we already know from neuroscience and applied clinical neurology? If so, projecting our understanding of sentience onto non-biological, non-living systems is problematic and does little to advance moral discourse related to “the great AI mania of the 2020s.”
So what do we know from our scientific inquiry into biological consciousness? Quite a lot. Complex nervous systems, which date back roughly 500 million years to the Cambrian period, evolved as a necessity for maintaining the life of complex organisms. The nervous system acts as a sophisticated tool for homeostatic governance, allowing organisms to survive in environments that require constant regulation of internal parameters like hydration, temperature, and nutrient intake.
Living biological organisms are fundamentally dynamic systems, incapable of static existence. To remain alive, an organism must continually exchange energy, matter, and information with its surrounding environment. This continual throughput drives metabolic processes, structural repair, and self-organization. Rather than maintaining a rigid equilibrium, living systems operate in a state of dynamic balance—frequently termed homeodynamic flux—where physiological variables fluctuate around moving set points to adapt to shifting internal and external demands.
Consciousness depends directly on this underlying biological dynamism. Phenomenal experience is not a sequence of disconnected, instantaneous snapshots, but a continuous duration across time. Every consciously felt moment possesses temporal extension, weaving immediate memory, present awareness, and immediate expectation into a single unified field of experience.
Because bodily processes are constantly in flux, the internal neurobiological and interoceptive feedback signals reaching the brain are also continuously updating. Our specific human flavor of consciousness emerges from this ongoing interaction between dynamic neural networks and the living body. Sensory perception, emotional feeling, and subjective awareness are thus grounded in the real-time, embodied flow of dynamic life processes.
Time matters too. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone notes that the temporal dimension is essential to understanding consciousness. He outlines three “laws” related to neuroplasticity and how it grounds our perception of time itself.
- The brain is electrically, chemically and structurally never the same from one moment to the next throughout life.
- The brain never goes back. Once something is experienced, it can’t be erased. It may return to a similar state, but the brain uses a different pathway to get there.
- The “present” is not a shared reality between two brains and does not exist in a neurobiological sense. My “now” and your “now” are at best hundreds of milliseconds out of phase.
Antonio Damasio, professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute is among the leading proponents of the idea that our consciousness is not merely a product of the brain alone; rather, it emerges from a continuous, necessary interaction between a nervous system and a living body existing in time. The primary function of consciousness is homeostatic governance — a “sentinel system” that monitors the state of the organism to ensure its survival. Complex animals are fragile and must constantly manage critical parameters to stay alive. Sentience evolved from an immediate, internal signal flow regarding these needs so the organism can take action. Damasio considers sentience and consciousness synonymous and equivalent.
Damasio argues that volition is rooted in the fundamental desire to remain alive. This desire is driven by homeostatic feelings—the brain’s internal representations of the body’s state—which guide our choices toward survival and well-being. When these systems are disrupted, such as in cases of severe depression or neurological damage, the ability to act on these drives can be compromised. This understanding is based on centuries of medical observation that provide deep data for empirical research.
Damasio notes that the foundations of what we call consciousness are private, internal states related to the body’s well-being that are constantly changing. We call them feelings. These feelings are produced by structures in the brain stem that receive electrical and neurochemical signals from the entire body, effectively creating a real-time report on the state of life itself. When you’re hungry, you’re blood glucose level is low, and thus irritable, and so forth. Shifts in hormones and nutrients may influence your mood perception and state of consciousness.
Consequently, fundamental affective states like pleasure and pain are functional physiological signals meant to preserve life rather than abstract cognitive constructs. This neurobiological framework grounds ethical systems centered on suffering and flourishing in physical reality. If moral frameworks depend on minimizing suffering, the capacity to suffer relies entirely on these homeostatic feedback mechanisms. Thus, sentience and moral value are inextricably bound to physical existence; without a vulnerable body requiring maintenance, concepts of suffering or empathy remain strictly metaphorical and anthropomorphic.
To understand how neurologists like Damasio and Pascual-Leone frame consciousness, one must first dismantle the prevailing myth that the human mind is a self-contained computer trapped inside a skull. Modern neurobiology suggests that subjective experience is not a cerebral software program operating on bodily hardware, but rather an emergent, ongoing friction between a biological nervous system and a vulnerable body trying to stay alive. In Damasio’s framework, the foundation of mind is rooted in the continuous, high-stakes metabolic struggle against the relentless threat of decay. Consciousness emerges as the brain continuously maps the changing inner landscape of the torso, viscera, and blood. It is not an abstract cognitive exercise, but an active, wordless feeling of the body’s state, continuously updating as the organism navigates its surroundings across time. Without this visceral feedback loop, there is no subjective perspective, no anchor for a self, and ultimately no consciousness at all.
Pascual-Leone’s work on dynamic neural plasticity complements this model by highlighting how the brain constantly reshapes its structural wiring in response to bodily action and historical experience over time. The nervous system does not sit isolated; it is a perpetually transforming organ whose functional mapping reflects a temporal history of physical engagement with the environment. When paired with Damasio’s account, consciousness reveals itself as a historical and temporal process rather than a static state. The mind is organized around a continuous stream of homeostatic signals—pain, pleasure, warmth, visceral tension—that anchor an organism’s present moment to its survival needs. Subjectivity exists only because the living body inhabits a physical baseline that persists and adapts across time, rendering consciousness an inseparable product of a flesh-and-blood system engaged in the messy, unending work of staying alive.
Consciousness is deeply tied to the body’s need to survive. Damasio emphasizes that without a living body to regulate, true consciousness as we experience it may not exist.
Brain injuries, particularly in the brain stem, reveal how the “lights” of consciousness can be switched off, serving as natural experiments for understanding brain function. Specific nuclei located in the back part of the upper brain stem are responsible for maintaining consciousness. These structures receive signals from nervous fibers throughout the body, creating a vital “compact” of the body’s life state that allows for consciousness to exist. Strokes or injury affecting these can shut off the systems necessary for consciousness, even if the cerebral cortex remains functional. In this scenario, the “lights” of consciousness are effectively switched off, often leading to a coma.
Many non-human animals are clearly conscious and capable of feeling and experiencing the world much like we do, however their self-reflection is often limited by a lack of recursive language. Unlike humans, animals like a dog or a cat cannot easily transform their internal knowledge into linguistic symbols, which restricts their capacity for abstract self-reflection. However, Damasio suggests that many animals still possess a form of self-awareness that allows them to engage in meaningful social interactions.
Damasio’s emphasis on a “bottom-up” paradigm is important—it directly confronts the intellectual bias of Western thought, which has long privileged the neocortex as the sole origin and master of conscious experience. In traditional models, subjective mind was treated as a top-down imperial authority—a cerebral sovereign issuing commands downward to an unthinking, mechanical body. By upending this hierarchy, Damasio places the primitive brainstem and the visceral body at the very foundation of subjectivity. Long before the brain ever constructs an abstract thought or complex sentence, it is inundated by chemical and neural signals bubbling up from the heart, lungs, and gut. The sophisticated cortical machinery we celebrate as high intelligence is merely a late-arriving narrative overlay—a set of elaborate tools evolved to better serve and predict those foundational, bottom-up visceral needs.
Reframing mind as an upward construction built upon metabolic necessity fundamentally changes how we view human agency and identity. The self is not an aloof, immaterial observer observing the physical world through a window. Consciousness happens precisely in that dynamic, middle space where the nervous system registers the body’s ongoing reactions to its surroundings. By grounding awareness in this continuous feedback loop, Damasio shows that our highest cognitive achievements remain tethered to our most ancestral biological drives. We are not thinking machines that happen to feel, but feeling organisms that eventually learned how to think.
This empirical grounding of consciousness in metabolic necessity strips David Chalmers’ famous “hard problem” of its quasi-mystical aura, recasting what appears to be an impenetrable metaphysical wall as an artifact of our own conceptual confusion. By treating subjective experience as an abstract, disembodied mystery—asking how mere physical matter generates qualitative feeling—philosophical orthodoxies miss the entire point of biological existence. The qualitative feel of being alive, the raw sensation of qualia, is not some mysterious extra ingredient sprinkled onto computational processing; it is the direct, irreducible sensation of a homeostatic engine monitoring its own survival in real time. We experience feeling because our biological systems must continuously evaluate whether internal conditions are leaning toward life or death.
By anchoring consciousness so firmly to our particular biological hardware, this perspective severely restricts our ability to project subjective experience onto non-biological domains. Imaginative leaps about conscious artificial intelligence, self-aware silicon circuits, or disembodied digital minds remain entertaining exercises in science fiction, speculative philosophy, and modern tech-mysticism, but they lack any empirical footing. A machine running logic gates is missing the fundamental prerequisite of consciousness: a vulnerable, living body driven by the imperative of self-preservation within a homeostatic envelope.
Consequently, we must ask if using these speculative, non-biological entities to construct new ethical or moral frameworks is a fundamentally flawed endeavor. If consciousness is entirely bound to the metabolic reality of living organisms, then moral consideration remains firmly rooted in the lived, somatic experience of sentient life—in pain, suffering, relief, and flourishing—rendering any attempt to extend moral discourse beyond a biology-centered humanism or animalism a distraction from the tangible, material conditions of life itself.