Source
- Newen & Montemayor (2025), LIT-626, read in NOTE-489: “Two framework observations” (a), “The various functions of phenomenal consciousness”, Table 1 and the Conclusion.
- Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, read in NOTE-330: “The neural substrates of feeling” and its claims C4–C5, for the subcortical clause only.
The claim, in two clauses
Basic arousal is realised without cortex. Newen and Montemayor, in LIT-626, set “as a criterion of adequacy that basic arousal can be realized without the necessary involvement of cortical areas”. Basic arousal is “a sensitivity for pain, pleasure and other basic affective states without focused attention”, which they identify with Denton’s primordial emotions. Their evidence is three cited findings. Merker’s hydranencephalic children, born without cortex, “most plausibly have very basic affective experiences of comfort and distress”. Cats with the cortex removed in infancy still orient by vision and touch and solve a visual discrimination in a T-maze. In Redinbaugh et al. (2020), stimulation of the central lateral thalamus woke anaesthetised macaques, which fell back when it stopped; while stimulated they “reacted to pain stimuli and perceptual stimuli” but could not do tasks that need focused attention. The neural correlates of basic arousal, they conclude, can lie in the upper brainstem and thalamus, “but this seems to be only the case for basic arousal”. They reject Merker’s stronger claim, that no consciousness depends on cortex.
Damasio and Carvalho, in LIT-388, reach the same place from the anatomy of feeling, without the word consciousness doing the work. The upper brainstem (parabrachial nucleus, periaqueductal grey, deep superior colliculus, with the nucleus of the solitary tract) is where interoceptive signals first form a whole-body map, and they place the generation of feeling there (C5 in NOTE-330). Damage to the posterior half of the upper brainstem gives coma or a vegetative state, in which “feelings and sentience are abolished”; damage to the ventral half gives locked-in syndrome, with feeling spared. Their patient B, whose insulae were both destroyed, still felt pain, pleasure, hunger and compassion, so the insula is not needed (C4). They also cite decorticate children. Two independent lines, one from a theory of consciousness and one from a theory of feeling, put a felt, affective state below the cortex.
Its first function is alarm, with no choice. The function clause is ALARM’s alone. In LIT-626, slow homeostatic updating cannot secure survival under a sudden, extreme challenge, so the incoming signal is given “100% weight”, triggering “an immediate survival reaction”. A reflex could do that much. What felt pain adds, they argue, is three things: the animal keeps away from the hot stove afterwards, it rests and protects the injury while the pain lasts, and it learns to avoid anything that causes pain “even for the first time … without any multi-case associative learning”. Those are basic arousal’s “three specific functional roles”: “(i) triggering a survival behaviour, (ii) caring for the body, and (iii) initiating a generalized learning”. The first “conscious manager” relies “on rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”, and choice “emerge[s]” only with general alertness, which is cortical: “the kind of cost avoidance involved in basic arousal does not involve a choice”. Later functions work only while the older one is not overriding them.
How this bears on the record’s accounts
It extends THEORY-045. THEORY-045 holds that felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, valenced by what that state means for staying alive, and it leaves open whether what is felt is a map of the body or a prediction of it. This account builds on that base and widens it in two directions THEORY-045 explicitly declines: it says that such felt affect is a form of consciousness, and the first one, and it says what it was for. ALARM’s alarm is THEORY-045’s regulatory state in the case where a variable leaves its tolerance range. The subcortical clause also sides with Damasio and Carvalho (LIT-388) on the location half of THEORY-045’s open question, the upper brainstem rather than Barrett’s agranular limbic cortex. It does not settle that question: ALARM’s one sentence against prediction, that pain alarms “in ways that mere predictions … cannot capture”, is asserted, not argued, and the evidence here bears on where feeling is generated, not on whether it is a map or a forecast.
It rivals THEORY-101. Veit’s pathological complexity thesis, in LIT-105, holds that consciousness began as hedonic valence serving as a common currency for trade-offs in action selection, so that motivational trade-offs are his criterion for consciousness. ALARM’s first consciousness is the opposite: a signal whose job is to remove the trade-off by taking all the weight. Both accounts are affect-first and adaptationist, and both place the oldest consciousness in subcortical evaluative structures (Veit reads the bilaterally integrated SN–SC–PAG “selection triangle” as “strong evidence here that the evaluative side of experience came first”). So they agree on the subcortical clause and exclude each other on the function clause. A first consciousness whose job is to arbitrate between options and one whose job is to override them cannot both be the original function. They also split on learning: ALARM ties basic arousal to a new, generalised kind of learning close to unlimited associative learning, which Veit holds explains later features of consciousness, not its origin.
What this does not say
- It does not say that more complex consciousness needs cortex. ALARM claims that general alertness needs cortical processing, but this account leaves that clause out. Maldarelli and Güntürkün’s review (LIT-650), filed as THEORY-100, reports report-tracking neurons in the crow’s nuclear, non-laminar pallium, which is evidence against reading “cortex” there as laminar cortex. That review also reads global workspace theory as a connectome property a bird can meet, where ALARM reads it as prefrontal.
- It does not say that the subcortical state is felt because it is subcortical. The evidence is that some state survives without cortex and that behaviour suggests affect. Whether a decorticate cat’s orienting, or a stimulated macaque’s response to pain, is felt is the question at issue, and both sources fall back on behaviour “consistent with” feeling (NOTE-330, Assumptions; NOTE-489, Limitations).
- The function clause is argued, not tested. No comparative or phylogenetic data are offered for it (C2 in NOTE-489, weak to moderate). Its argument from felt pain’s advantages presupposes that the pain is felt.
- LIT-388 does not support the function clause. Damasio and Carvalho hold that felt experience was added to body mapping because it makes regulation more flexible, forcing attention and supporting learning and prediction (C3 in NOTE-330, a hypothesis). That agrees with ALARM on learning and sits uneasily with its “without choices”. Damasio & Damasio (LIT-387, unread) state the affect-first origin more directly.
- It takes no side on IIT, global workspace or higher-order theory as theories of general alertness. ALARM’s complaint is that each makes neocortex essential and so omits basic arousal; it says it stays “neutral” among them for the rest.
- It is not a claim about phenomenal character. Like THEORY-045, it says where a felt affective state is realised and what it does, not why it is felt at all. ALARM sets epiphenomenalism aside without argument.
Note of 2026-10-12: scope against THEORY-096
THEORY-096 adopts Dehaene and Naccache’s premise that global availability, carried by cortical hubs, “is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state”. Taken generally, that premise leaves no room for the affective consciousness without cortex that this account describes. Taken as THEORY-096’s own title states it, about perceptual consciousness, it leaves room. This account says it stays neutral among the workspace and its rivals as theories of general alertness, and THEORY-096 is about perceptual access. So the two can both be right if the premise is read narrowly. They cannot if it is read generally. No rivals is declared, because neither account commits to the general reading.
Note of 2026-10-14: LIT-965 is not a second source
Emergence from anaesthesia (LIT-965, read in NOTE-797) is consistent with the subcortical clause: the cited data have ancient structures with “only limited neocortical involvement” sufficing. It must not count as a second source for “before and without cortex”. The authors keep “limited neocortical connectivity and recurrent processing” in the core, and their marker of returning consciousness is command-following, a marker of access, not of felt alarm. The statement is unchanged.
Note of 2026-10-23: the rivalry recast as continuity
On the owner’s reading of valence as potential of a negotiation by an ordering of the system’s own states (CLAIM-440), this account and its rival are two regimes of one thing: Veit’s currency is compensatory, continuous potential, and ALARM’s override is overriding potential. CLAIM-436 shows a continuous ordering has a numerical representation; a threshold override has a discontinuous one, so in that form the override is an extreme weight and the dissolution this record imagined goes through; a graded override has none, and in that form it does not. CLAIM-435 recasts the rivalry as one question, whether the earliest trade-off curves are continuous, and if not, which form the override takes. The statement is unchanged.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
No marker that tells a felt alarm from an unfelt one has been fixed in advance and applied to animals or patients without functioning cortex. No comparative or lesion result shows one-trial generalised avoidance and protection of an injury vanishing with basic arousal while reflex withdrawal survives. Both sources argue from cited findings whose feltness is the point at issue, and the function clause is argued from felt pain’s advantages, which presupposes that the pain is felt. Once CLAIM-435’s other premises are held, a split on THEORY-1110’s pattern, an Active reading of what Newen and Montemayor propose, is the route that would make CLAIM-435’s ground held.