Antonio Damasio on connecting homeostasis, value and consciousness

“What we have come to designate as valuable, in terms of goods or actions, is directly or indirectly related to the possibility of maintaining a homeostatic range in the interior of living organisms.

(...) Optimal ranges express themselves in the conscious minds as pleasurable feelings; dangerous ranges, as not-so-pleasant or even painful feelings.

¿Can one imagine a more transparent detection system? Optimal workings of an organism, which result in efficient, harmonious states of life, constitute the very substrate of our primordial feelings of well-being and pleasure. They are the foundation of the state that, in quite elaborate settings, we call happiness. On the contrary, disorganized, inefficient, inharmonious life states, the harbingers of disease and system failure, constitute the substrate of negative feelings, of which, as Tolstoy observed so accurately, there are far more varieties than of the positive kind –an infinite assortment of pain and suffering, not to mention disgust, fears, anger, sadness, shame, guilt and contempt.”  

– Antonio Damasio, Self comes to mind. Constructing the conscious brain (P. 55-56)