The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Mark Solms, 2021)
"The simplest forms of feeling – hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate and the like – might not seem like affects, but that is what they are.
What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing.
Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value – but feeling does. (…)
Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
This is what affects are for: they convey which biological things are going well or badly for us, and they arouse us to do something about them.
In this respect, affective sensations are different from perceptual ones."
