Feeling, not thinking, is the start of consciousness.

Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio propose that feelings, specifically homeostatic feelings, are the source of consciousness. These feelings are the mental translation of processes occurring in the body as it strives to balance its many systems, achieve homeostasis, and keep the individual alive. Consciousness fuses the body and mind processes and gives our selves a home inside that partnership. The hard problem of consciousness concerns the difficulty of having a physical entity, such as the brain, produce a non-physical process called the mind. The Damasios' account of consciousness addresses the hard problem and proposes a candidate mechanism to account for conscious experiences.