We do not know all that much about what is going on inside our own body. So when we take a medicine we might or might not be consciously aware of having taken something: there might or might not be more or less immediate symptoms which we are consciously aware of.
In something of the same way, if something is going wrong with the body, perhaps the spleen is misbehaving, we might or might not be consciously aware of a problem - either a specific problem which we can locate in the body, or something much vaguer like just feeling a bit off-colour or tired or there being some vague discomfort.
For present purposes, I discount the symptom of getting better. Of being fairly sure that one is feeling better because one started taking some medicine a few weeks ago.
With the blood testing which is available now filling something of the gap, with many bodily goings-on or problems resulting in detectable markers in the blood.
While recreational substances like alcohol, nicotine or caffeine are rather different from medicines: the whole point is to be aware of having taken something. Although, in a bad case, all one gets is alleviation of a craving - not much recreation about that at all.
All this because I was reminded yesterday (Tuesday) of the distinct feeling that I had taken some active medicine that I used to get when I first started taking warfarin, more than ten years ago now. That is to say I got this feeling perhaps a quarter of an hour after taking the daily dose. It was a feeling that something about the body, one's feeling of one's own body, the sensations that one was getting from one's own body, had changed in some way; that something was going on - but I could not say more. I could not say what the change was - but change there had been. Feelings which, I should say, I no longer get.
I associate to two very similar rectangular patches of colour being placed side by side. One is conscious of their being different, one is conscious of a clear boundary line between the two patches, but one is sometimes hard put to say what the difference is. Which, for example, of the patches is the darker. I dare say something of the sort can happen with two musical notes which are very close in both pitch and timbre.
I associate also to the strong emotions which one cannot put a name to. Psychologists go to a lot of trouble to catalogue, to organise emotions, perhaps placing them in a circular, two dimensional array - but certainly giving them names like anger, shame or elation. But speaking for myself, I often get strong emotions which I cannot name. One is emotional but that is about it: no name and no place on the two dimensional array.
I suppose that, in the case of the warfarin, this distinct feeling might be an artefact of the brain rather than the body. The brain knew that I had taken the medicine and decided that some feeling of this, some feeling about this, ought to be transmitted to consciousness. Nothing to do with the body at all.
Not that I will ever know. But perhaps I will give some thought later today to how all this might work in the absence of language, in the absence of names.
PS: the rather elaborate diagram of emotions included above was taken from reference 1 and was turned up by Bing.
References
Reference 1: Modeling Emotions in a Computational System - Emotional Modeling in the Independent Core Observer Model Cognitive Architecture - David Kelley - 2016.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/an-instrument.html. A previous outing for patches of colour. Semi circular in this case.
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