On 2016 Dec 21, Adam Safron commented:

Thank you for this fascinating work! Some alternative suggestions regarding the proposal that preservation of feelings with bilateral insula damage suggests a subcortical basis for feeling awareness: 1. Cingulate cortex is preserved, which is likely to be able to engage in some degree of perceptual inference of interoceptive states, since all cortex has both "sensory" and "motor" properties. 2. A substantial amount of feeling is likely not purely interoceptive (e.g. via body position and patterns of muscular tension), and even if it were, such information is likely substantially instantiated in non-insular (and non-cingulate) body maps, particularly since this brain damage occurred in adulthood, and so 'representations' have had a great deal of time to become more generally distributed. 3. It seems that for a structure to be sufficient for supporting awareness, it must also able to hierarchically model a world in which things with specific attributes are able to be situated relative to other things with specific attributes, with spatiotemporal situating potentially being particularly important (i.e., precise feature binding allowing for the realization of the kinds of synthetic a priori categories that Kant suggested may represent pre-conditions for any judgment/sense-making whatsoever).

On 2016 Dec 21, Adam Safron commented:

Thank you for this fascinating work! Some alternative suggestions regarding the proposal that preservation of feelings with bilateral insula damage suggests a subcortical basis for feeling awareness: 1. Cingulate cortex is preserved, which is likely to be able to engage in some degree of perceptual inference of interoceptive states, since all cortex has both "sensory" and "motor" properties. 2. A substantial amount of feeling is likely not purely interoceptive (e.g. via body position and patterns of muscular tension), and even if it were, such information is likely substantially instantiated in non-insular (and non-cingulate) body maps, particularly since this brain damage occurred in adulthood, and so 'representations' have had a great deal of time to become more generally distributed. 3. It seems that for a structure to be sufficient for supporting awareness, it must also able to hierarchically model a world in which things with specific attributes are able to be situated relative to other things with specific attributes, with spatiotemporal situating potentially being particularly important (i.e., precise feature binding allowing for the realization of the kinds of synthetic a priori categories that Kant suggested may represent pre-conditions for any judgment/sense-making whatsoever).