Consciousness Arises From Your Feelings—Not Thoughts, Scientists Say

5 min readCogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Most of us have probably heard the French philosopher René Descartes’s famous dictum countless times. It encapsulates the prevailing view of what it means to be human: Reason and analytical thinking lie at the heart of consciousness, and these are what set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The more rational the mind, the more sophisticated the consciousness—and, by that logic, we sit triumphantly at the top of the cognitive ladder.But for a growing number of neuroscientists and consciousness researchers, Descartes may have had the order backward. The fix, however, requires only a one-word edit: replace cogito with sentio—I feel. Suddenly, consciousness begins not with thought, but with feeling.“Consciousness is a lower process compared to thinking and, very importantly, is a process that is protective of life,” says Antonio Damasio, PhD, a neuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California. For Damasio, consciousness emerged very early in evolution, long before humans. Likewise, he believes that consciousness precedes the cerebral cortex—the brain’s outer layer and evolutionary crown jewel, which is responsible for logic, planning, and abstract thinking. The cortex appeared much later in evolutionary history, becoming increasingly sophisticated before reaching its greatest complexity in humans. But, Damasio argues, the heart of consciousness isn’t in this “lofty” seat of higher cognition at all.“It started in the collection of signals from the body that give you an idea of how your life is going,” Damasio says. These are what he calls homeostatic feelings: the brain’s continuous readout of the body’s internal state and one of evolution’s oldest biological systems for maintaining life. Pain is a perfect example. “What is it doing?” he asks. “It’s alerting you to something that is not going right in your body, in your life, and therefore allowing you to do something about what is wrong.” Hunger, thirst, and fever do exactly the same. Even happiness serves a purpose. “It's telling you, ‘you have license to enjoy life,’” Damasio explains.Damasio has spent more than two decades building this idea in a series of books, from The Feeling of What Happens in 1999 through Self Comes to Mind and The Strange Order of Things. But he says it was only while writing his forthcoming book, Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness, that another major piece of the puzzle fell into place. Previously he argued that feelings give rise to consciousness. Now, Damasio says he’s more confident in that theory than ever, and he believes he can also explain where those feelings come from. The answer, he says, lies in one of the oldest populations of nerve cells in the body: unmyelinated neurons.Unlike most neurons, these ancient cells lack the insulating fatty coating known as myelin. Their unmyelinated fibers remain in constant communication with the surrounding organs and tissues, continuously relaying information about the body's internal condition to the brain. “It is out of that connection between the nerve cells and the body that feelings emerge,” he says.Another scientist, Stuart Hameroff, MD, an anesthesiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, agrees that feelings came first. He just defines “first” very differently. Perhaps feelings didn’t evolve at all, Hameroff suggests. In fact, maybe the universe has always generated tiny proto-conscious events—or “proto-feelings”—through quantum processes such as wave function collapse.A tiny quantum particle can briefly exist in several possible states at once. Eventually, nature chooses one; physicists call this process wave function collapse. Hameroff argues that this isn’t merely a mathematical event, but “actually a process in spacetime geometry.” According to him, each wave function collapse produces “a moment of phenomenal experience... kind of like a quantum of conscious feelings, a quantum of consciousness.”According to Hameroff, these proto-conscious events occur everywhere—in the atmosphere, in the table and the chair you are sitting on, and throughout the cosmos, but only at an unimaginably tiny scale. He calls the idea “quantum panprotopsychism.” It’s a modern quantum twist on the ancient philosophical idea of panpsychism, or the notion that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, much like gravity or electromagnetism.“Pan-proto means [that] everywhere is this proto-consciousness,” Hameroff says. “It’s quantum because it’s not a property. It’s an event, a series of events. So each collapse is a moment of consciousness.”Unlike traditional panpsychism, however, Hameroff says these events are not conscious experiences in themselves. They are fleeting. “They come and go, but are isolated. No memory. No communication. We don’t bother them. They don’t bother us.” Much like the countless low-level phenomena constantly swirling around us that we never perceive, from radio waves and WiFi signals to cosmic rays, we remain oblivious to this background activity.But there comes a point where those isolated events do become experience. Hameroff compares it to an orchestra. Before the concert begins, musicians tune their instruments independently, producing what sounds like random noise. Then the orchestra begins to play, transforming those individual notes “into something beautiful, a symphony with resonances, harmonics, harmony, interference, beats.” According to the Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory of consciousness—which Hameroff developed with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose—something similar happens inside the brain. Tiny protein structures inside neurons called microtubules orchestrate (or in Hameroff’s terminology, entangle) billions of these events into a single stream of awareness: you.Whether the roots of feeling lie entirely within biology or reach far deeper into the universe remains an open question. Damasio, for his part, is comfortable leaving some mysteries unsolved. “I don’t have any problem with having mysteries that I cannot explain,” he says. “I actually find it kind of interesting.”And when it comes to headache-inducing modern questions such as whether artificial intelligence (AI) is conscious, Damasio has little doubt where he stands. In his view, consciousness belongs to living creatures with nervous systems capable of generating the feelings that regulate life. A tree, however fascinating, has no nervous system. Neither does a mushroom nor a sponge.Even if engineers could one day build something resembling consciousness, it would not be consciousness as we experience it. Without the biological imperative to stay alive, AI lacks the homeostatic feelings at the heart of human consciousness. Life is an ongoing struggle to preserve itself, and the feelings arising from that effort give rise to what we experience as consciousness.“Consciousness is not about high flights of intellectual fancy,” Damasio says. “It’s about first and foremost the maintenance and regulation of life.”In Damasio’s view, Aristotle, Mozart, a cat, a mouse, and a lion are all conscious in the same fundamental way. They are aware of their own lives and of what they feel. They may not all ponder cogito ergo sum. But they sure live by sentio.Stav Dimitropoulos is a Gold and Community Anthem Award–winning journalist, and writes about consciousness, science, and culture for Popular Mechanics, Nature, and the BBC. Her work often explores mind-stretching angles where science meets philosophy. Her debut nonfiction book, Slow, Lazy, Gluttons (Greystone Books, 2026) asks: What if the traits society shames — laziness, darkness, nostalgia, and more — are actually survival superpowers?