Philosophers and neuroscientists alike have long puzzled over qualia — the subjective feel of experience. Pain feels like pain. Red looks like red. Yet no brain scan has ever shown a single pixel of that redness.
There is no falsifiable model that explains how physical processes alone give rise to experience. And that’s the heart of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995). But we don’t need mysticism to make progress.
Let’s start with what we know. Emotions have clear biochemical underpinnings: neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine alter our heart rate, our hormonal balance, our pupil dilation. “Emotion is the body’s chemical reaction to perception,” writes LeDoux (2015).
But even a fully functioning emotional system doesn’t produce qualia without memory. Imagine a human-like body that reacts with all the proper hormonal and neural signatures of anger or pain — but without the ability to remember anything from one moment to the next. That body would feel nothing. It would simply react.
Qualia, I argue, require emotionally tagged memory. Not just the storage of information, but the encoding of it with valence — “this hurts,” “this is pleasant,” “this is terrifying.” Without that tagging and retrieval, there is no consciousness, no self-awareness.
You can test this theory on yourself. Burn your hand on a frying pan. First comes the spinal reflex to withdraw — a pure motor response. But only after fractions of a second do you realize: “I felt pain.” Why? Because awareness lags behind action. Neurons continue to fire, and that data enters memory as an emotionally salient record. You felt pain because you remembered it.
Local anesthesia confirms this: “If pain signals are blocked before reaching the thalamus, no conscious experience of pain arises,” says Tracey (2011). Likewise, anesthesia drugs that disrupt memory alone — without blocking sensory input — are still effective because no memory means no qualia (Mashour & Hudetz, 2018).
Reflex is not consciousness. Plants like Mimosa pudica can recoil at touch. Computers can process and store information. Neither are conscious. What’s missing is the integrated, emotionally tagged record of experience.
Even stored language follows this rule. A word learned in a classroom is accessible years later because memory was laid down through emotional relevance or repetition. But a word heard under general anesthesia? Gone. Not forgotten — never remembered in the first place.
In short: without memory, no experience. Without emotional tagging, no consciousness. And without qualia, there is no self.
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
LeDoux, J. E. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.
Mashour, G. A., & Hudetz, A. G. (2018). Neural correlates of unconsciousness in large-scale brain networks. Trends in Neurosciences, 41(3), 150–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2017.12.002
Tracey, I. (2011). Can neuroimaging studies identify pain endophenotypes in humans? Nature Reviews Neurology, 7(3), 173–181. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrneurol.2011.6