Adults are Big Babies
The infant feels the world before s/he knows the world or speaks to that world. The infant above all else feels mom, perhaps even more than mom feels the baby. The world is meaningful to the infant because the feelings of that infant make indelible marks upon its neural network that we call the brain.
The inner world of infants has become illuminated by new experimental techniques, which allow experimenters to test hypothesis. Eye movements are especially useful for such experiments; for example, infants indicate their boredom by their drifting eyes when shown the same visual image over and over.
The infant begins (like all animals) with its various sensorimotor and conceptual capacities; all of which define its mental limitations regarding what in the world can be experienced and how that experience becomes meaningful to humans.
Babies must learn the meaning of objects and events “that will eventually make up their mature, shared experience of a common world”. The baby starts the learning process with various plastic and dynamic mental capacities intimately coupled with more fixed sensorimotor and conceptual capacities that determine the constraints on what can be experienced and how that experience can be meaningful to humans.
“We thus grow into a meaningful world by learning how to “take the measure” of our ongoing, flowing, continuous experience. We grow into the ability to experience meaning, and we grow into shared, interpersonal meanings and experiences.”
Above quotes from “The Meaning of the Body” Mark Johnson
“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”
First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.
Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book “The Feelings of What Happens” that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’.
Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously.
The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.
