A discordant domain of needs and wants

The title of this post is, I think, as adequate a description of the life of our myriad desires as any. On this blog I've entered many posts that have to do with topics that that relate to how it is in the nature of biological organisms to have competing desires. To be completely honest, I have come to realize that there seems to be more mystery in the fact that I find this "discord" so interesting than in the structure of the discord itself-or in how the discord relates to our biological makeup.

When one looks at the structure of biological organisms, the existence of this discord seems reasonable in that different parts of our nervous system must compel us to go in different directions, often simultaneously. There's nothing to stop a biological system from developing competing drives so long as there the structure(s) allow for the development of both (competing) functions. Evolution has rooted out the potential for some competing drives but not others.

When I first became interested in this general topic, I thought that an understanding of the biological mechanisms that led to competing/contradictory drives would be the way to explain my feelings of "this is not right." I've learned about these mechanisms (though not in great detail), and written here about how these structures can account for competing desires within a single person.

But this has not provided a resolution for the feelings that led me in this direction in the first place. What has seemed so weird to me about these competing desires is that they run counter to our experience of phenomenological unity.

I think this has important implications for our developing understanding of the relation between phenomenology and biology (how consciousness relates to the body, basically). It implies that certain affective regions of the brain can be active and dominate our experience and our desires, and that when this is happening, other brain regions that may correlate with separate desires may or may not be active-and if they are, then we will feel competing, or at least different desires. The crucial question is "what kind of activity makes one region align with consciousness?" The first answer here would seem to be that the neurons in the particular subnetwork fire, activating the network, and this is what leads us to have the particular kind of experience associated with that brain area.