Interoception consists of sensing one´s own physiologic conditions,
including heartbeats, gastric filling, and bladder fullness. The experience emerges from
neuronal activity at the insula. The brain represents primary interoception in the
posterior insula and integrates it with emotional salience in a posterior to anterior insula
activation pattern. The posterior to anterior instantiation of interoceptive information
provides evidence that consciousness indeed represents the product of abstractions
across the brain hierarchical levels. Different abstraction patterns refer to distinct levels
of representation of tissue-specific and whole-body homeostatic states, from basic
interoceptive experiences to a more abstract representation of wellbeing, integration of
exteroception, emotional awareness, and cognitive processing. The brain successively
realizes these qualitative differences along the axis that links the posterior to the
anterior insula. Interoception and its derivative emotional states fit the concept of
realized information in the context of potential states represented across system
hierarchies. These studies and considerations validate the paradigm of embodied
abstractions. Research in the field of interoception often supports a role for strange
loops in the realization of information. Interoceptive awareness arises from the fusion
of subject and body, where the body plays the role of a building block of the self it
represents. This pattern is consistent with consciousness as action, and with Damasio’s
views of consciousness as the product of a reaction of the organism to an object as the
organism regulates itself to process this object.
Keywords: Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Awareness of Heart Beats, Bladder
Fullness, Computational Hierarchy, Damasio, Embodied Abstractions, Emotional
Awareness, Experience of Body Ownership, Feeling of Agency, Homeostatic
Salience Integration, Interoception, Insula Hierarchical Organization, Insular
Cortex, Insula Instantiation, Meta-Representations, Multisensory Integration,
Primordial Strange Loop, Rubber Hand Illusion, Realization Across Levels of
Abstraction, Sense of Self.
