How Is Feeling Possible?

1. Statement of the Problem

What I want to discuss is not why a particular moment moves us, but how feeling itself is possible as a structure. Here, “how is it possible?” is not a general inquiry into neural activity, nor merely a search for the psychological cause of a certain feeling. It asks a more fundamental question: how does an event occurring in the physical world enter the structure of human life and become an experience with meaning, subjective ownership, and temporal continuity?

When sunlight enters a room, what I experience is not light considered simply as physical stimulation. Light of the same intensity and color temperature can, in different bodily states, stages of life, and real circumstances, make a person feel warm, peaceful, or nostalgic; it can also produce irritation, fatigue, or no feeling at all. Light does not directly determine the content of feeling. A specific feeling appears only after external stimulation enters a network of relations formed by bodily state, memory structure, conceptual system, and value judgment.

It is therefore useful to distinguish three levels analytically. The first is physical difference, such as light, temperature, sound, and spatial position. The second consists of cognitive and bodily mechanisms, including sensory processing, interoception, prediction, appraisal, memory retrieval, and allocation of attention. The third is experiential structure: why these processes can form a phenomenal field that has wholeness and continuity and is experienced as “my feeling.”

These three levels are related, but none can replace another. A physical description cannot directly yield the meaning of a feeling, and a description of cognitive mechanisms does not automatically complete an explanation of the structure of subjectivity. The principal concern of this essay is the third level.

2. Information Does Not Exist Prior to a Frame

Ordinary formulations easily create the impression that the external world first supplies complete information and that a person’s frame subsequently interprets it. This sequence is inaccurate.

If “information” here refers only to physical difference, then it has not yet become meaningful content for a particular system. A difference becomes information relative to a system only when that system can detect it and allow it to change the system’s subsequent state. In other words, a frame is not an interpretive tool added after information has already been formed. The system’s bodily structure, forms of memory, conceptual capacities, and needs for action participate in the selection and formation of information from the outset.

Predictive processing provides an important cognitive-scientific reference point. Andy Clark describes the brain as a system that continuously predicts sensory input through hierarchical generative models and revises those models through prediction error. Perception therefore does not receive the world from scratch; it is a process in which top-down prediction and bottom-up error signals mutually correct one another (Clark, 2013). Karl Friston’s free-energy principle attempts to place perception, learning, and action within a more general framework of inference and regulation (Friston, 2010).

These theories do not imply that the external world is merely a subjective construction. On the contrary, prediction must be continually revised because external differences constrain the system in the form of error, resistance, and consequences for action. The world is not arbitrarily manufactured by frames, but neither does it enter experience in a wholly unorganized form independent of the system’s structure. Experience forms through the mutual constraint of external differences and internal models.

3. Multiple Frames and Dynamic Stability

A person is not governed by a single frame. Childhood experience, adult life, bodily state, structures of knowledge, social roles, present goals, and value judgments all participate in the formation of current experience. Calling them “frames” does not suggest that the mind contains several separate, fixed templates. It indicates that current experience is always jointly constrained by multiple pre-existing structures.

These frames are nested within one another and can also conflict. The body may demand rest while a social role requires continued work; a childhood memory may give a scene a sense of intimacy, while knowledge and judgment acquired in adulthood lead the person to reevaluate that same scene. Unity in experience does not mean that these differences have disappeared. It means only that the system has formed a coordinative relation sufficient to continue operating at a certain timescale.

Human stability therefore cannot be understood simply as static equilibrium. It is closer to dynamic stability. A bicycle stays upright not because it remains at an equilibrium point beyond change, but because deviations are continually corrected in motion. This analogy is not empirical proof about psychological structure, but it reveals the difference between two kinds of stability. One maintains stability by excluding change; the other can be maintained only through continuous change. Living systems and human inner life clearly resemble the latter more closely.

The physiological concept of allostasis reflects a similar idea. Peter Sterling describes it as a predictive mode of regulation in which a system anticipates needs and allocates resources in advance to maintain stability, rather than waiting passively to restore a prior state after a deviation occurs (Sterling, 2012). Bruce McEwen’s research on allostasis and long-term allostatic load likewise shows that stability in living systems includes the cost of continual adaptation (McEwen, 2000). Sustenesis Theory, however, addresses a wider scope than physiological regulation. It asks not only how bodily variables remain within viable ranges, but also how meaning, identity, and experiential continuity are maintained under multiple constraints.

4. What the Relevant Research Can Explain

Cognitive appraisal theories of emotion hold that emotion is not the direct product of a stimulus, but is closely related to how a person judges an event’s relation to their goals, needs, capacity for control, and present circumstances. Scherer and Moors treat appraisal, action tendency, bodily response, expression, and subjective feeling as components that unfold over time and achieve a degree of synchronization. Notably, they also connect temporary coherence among these components with the formation of emotional experience (Scherer & Moors, 2019).

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion further rejects the idea that each emotion is a natural kind with a fixed biological fingerprint. On this account, the brain uses concepts formed through past experience to predict and categorize interoception and present circumstances, thereby constructing specific instances of emotion (Barrett, 2017). This offers a more detailed account of why the same stimulus can produce different feelings and supports the judgment that feeling cannot be reduced to a single stimulus-response relation.

Research on context-dependent memory shows that memory retrieval is influenced by the relation between the conditions of encoding and retrieval. Godden and Baddeley’s classic experiment on memory on land and underwater found that recall generally performs better when the learning and retrieval environments match (Godden & Baddeley, 1975). Later reviews and meta-analyses further confirmed that environmental context has a reliable but conditional effect on memory (Smith & Vela, 2001). This can partly explain why a particular light, smell, temperature, or spatial structure reactivates earlier experience.

Global neuronal workspace theory focuses on how information from certain local processes becomes amplified and sustained through a nonlinear “ignition” process and becomes widely available to multiple local systems. It provides a testable neurocognitive model of the global availability of conscious content (Mashour et al., 2020). Yet global availability does not automatically equal phenomenal experience, nor can it by itself explain why integrated information is presented as a feeling belonging to a subject.

The traditions of embodied and enactive cognition weaken, from another direction, the picture in which an internal subject first exists and then receives an external world. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch emphasize that cognition arises from the ongoing perceptual-action relation between body and environment. The world is not passively copied by a mind separated from its environment, but is enacted and disclosed in action (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991/2016).

These bodies of research clearly have room for dialogue with Sustenesis Theory, but they should not therefore be regarded as the same theory. Predictive processing explains how models and inputs mutually correct one another; appraisal theory explains how the meaning of an event participates in the formation of emotion; constructed emotion theory explains how bodily states and concepts form instances of emotion; context-dependent memory explains how environmental cues affect retrieval; global workspace theory explains how information becomes globally available; and embodied cognition stresses the inseparability of cognition from body-environment coupling. Their principal questions concern what operations a system performs and by what mechanisms those operations may be realized.

Sustenesis Theory raises a different-level question: why can these heterogeneous processes, without becoming completely consistent, form a whole that can continue, act, and be experienced as “me”?

5. From Mechanistic Explanation to Structural Explanation

A common inference must be avoided here. Even if we completely describe the neural activity, bodily changes, conceptual invocation, and memory retrieval that occur with a feeling, we cannot directly declare the problem of subjectivity solved. A mechanistic account tells us through which processes feeling is realized; a structural account must explain within what relations those processes form an experience possessing wholeness and continuity.

A system can simultaneously contain mutually inconsistent predictions, desires, memories, and value judgments. What truly needs explanation is not why inconsistency exists, but why such inconsistency does not cause experience to fragment immediately. Most of the time, a person can still understand conflict as “my conflict” and change as “my change,” and can continue judging and acting without achieving final unity.

This means that experiential unity should be understood neither as complete consistency nor as a fixed subject’s final synthesis of disordered materials. It is more likely that the subject itself is a structural result formed after this continual coordination reaches a certain degree of stability. Unity is not a presupposed condition but a temporary achievement; the subject is not a commander outside the process, but an organizational center maintained within it.

6. The Sustenetic Explanation

Sustenesis Theory takes difference, constraint, and maintainable coherence as its basic structure.

Difference is the starting point of any process of formation. Without differences between inside and outside, between states, and across time, there can be no information, change, or experience. Difference alone, however, is not enough to constitute feeling.

Constraint prevents differences from developing arbitrarily. Bodily structure determines what a system can receive, memory determines what is readily reactivated, concepts determine how experience can be categorized, and present circumstances and consequences for action continually limit the range of interpretation. Constraints are both limitations and conditions of formation. It is precisely because constraints exist that differences can acquire relatively stable relations.

Maintainable coherence does not mean that contradictions within the system have been eliminated. It means that multiple differences have formed, under constraint, enough interrelation for the system to continue maintaining itself, organizing experience, revising its state, and taking action at a certain time and scale. This coherence is always conditional and can always be disrupted by new differences.

From this perspective, feeling is neither the simple internal result of an external stimulus nor an added interpretation made by a pre-existing subject. Feeling is an experiential presentation generated within the system after multiple differences among body, memory, concepts, and environment form a temporarily maintainable coherence under constraint.

The meaning of “presentation” here still requires further research. What Sustenesis Theory can presently offer is a structural hypothesis: when multiple processes do not merely occur in parallel, but form persistent relations that can be retained, invoked, compared, and used by the system to influence subsequent action, those relations are no longer merely local changes. They begin to constitute the system’s integrated presentation of its own state and its relation to the world. Feeling is the concrete form this integrated presentation takes when it possesses bodily character and evaluative orientation.

7. Self-Consciousness and Free Will

If feeling is formed in the way described above, self-consciousness need not be understood as a fixed entity behind experience. The “I” is more likely a recursive structure formed when multiple frames are continually coordinated and the results of that coordination can be reincorporated into subsequent coordination.

The subject is therefore not the absolute starting point of all experience. It is gradually sustained through processes in which experience is continuously organized, retained, invoked, tested, and revised. It has continuity without an absolutely unchanging core. Continuity comes from the persistence of structural relations, not from all internal contents remaining identical.

Free will must also be reconsidered on this basis. If freedom is defined as complete independence from causal relations and real constraints, it is difficult to give it a clear meaning. An action wholly unconstrained would have neither conditions of formation nor a discernible direction. The freedom that can genuinely be discussed is a system’s capacity to identify some constraints, simulate different possible paths, compare the consequences of actions, and alter, within a certain range, the weighting of constraints and its own direction.

Freedom does not lie outside constraint; it occurs among constraints. It is not the absence of conditions, but the system’s ability to participate, within those conditions, in its own continued formation. The degree of freedom is therefore not all or nothing. It depends on how many differences the system can incorporate, how many constraints it can understand, and how extensively it can adjust its own structure.

Conclusion

The fundamental difficulties of human life arise not only from particular unsolved problems, but also from the structure of human existence itself. Body, memory, desire, knowledge, value, and social demand can never attain permanent unity, yet human beings must form among these differences a structure sufficient to sustain the continuation of life.

What truly must be maintained is not permanent equilibrium, but the capacity to keep adjusting; not the complete elimination of tension, but the prevention of tension from destroying the sustainability of the whole. Human stability is therefore not a completed state, but a continually occurring process of formation.

This is the mode of existence that Sustenesis Theory attempts to explain. Existence is not the simple continuation of a static entity, but the process through which differences form and maintain a certain coherence under constraint. Feeling, self-consciousness, and free will can be understood as manifestations of this process at different levels.

The final question of this essay can therefore be formulated as follows: how can a system composed of multiple differences maintain itself without eliminating those differences and continue to form a world that can be experienced, reflected upon, and acted in?

This question cannot be answered by neural mechanisms alone, nor by an abstract philosophy of the subject alone. It requires more precise explanatory levels to be established among cognitive science, the study of living systems, phenomenology, and ontology. The task of Sustenesis Theory is not to replace these fields, but to explain how the different mechanisms they disclose jointly enter a more fundamental structure of formation.

References

1. Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.
2. Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
3. Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 127–138.
4. Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331.
5. Mashour, G. A., Roelfsema, P., Changeux, J.-P., & Dehaene, S. (2020). Conscious processing and the global neuronal workspace hypothesis. Neuron, 105(5), 776–798.
6. McEwen, B. S. (2000). Allostasis and allostatic load: Implications for neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology, 22(2), 108–124.
7. Scherer, K. R., & Moors, A. (2019). The emotion process: Event appraisal and component differentiation. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 719–745.
8. Smith, S. M., & Vela, E. (2001). Environmental context-dependent memory: A review and meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 203–220.
9. Sterling, P. (2012). Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior, 106(1), 5–15.
10. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991/2016). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.