The central role of emotion-driven self-organization in consciousness

This paper brings together, from an enactivist and self-organizational perspective, two separate but parallel streams of research on the role of emotion in conscious and cognitive processes. There is already an extensive and growing body of research on the subcortical and limbic influences on the neuroplasticity of many brain functions, including cortical ones. At the same time, among cognitive theorists and philosophers of mind, there has been renewed interest in the enactivist and dynamical systems structure of mental processes, with growing attention to emotion as a driver of action affordances and action imagery that shape consciousness. However, there has been little attention to the way these two streams can enhance each other’s explanatory coherence. Neuroplasticity emerges as a common thread linking both streams. The theory of self-organization, as applied to emotion-driven enactivity in conscious functions, can serve as a conceptual bridge between these two emerging areas of research. Here, we offer a theoretical framing of the endogenously action-initiating dynamics of consciousness and its neural substrates as driven and shaped by emotion, with implications for both clinical intervention strategies and empirical research.