You think of consciousness on the model of a bootstrapping from a seed, as if there is first a tiny point of pure objectless auto-affection which gradually gathers in saliency and differentiation, becoming clearer and brighter, like an image coming into focus, until it gains sufficient strength that it becomes self-sustaining, self-referential and self-correcting. In the process of switching itself on various ancillary systems 'come on line' which enable the integration of diverse polyphonic contents, such as the activity of the senses, of thought, and feeling and will etc. This seems to be a natural picture, a version of the way we wake up each morning, the way consciousness unfolds out of sleep, or, casting a brief backward glance at our ontic evolution, the way we have developed from the blurry inwardness of infancy to our full daylight awareness of the objective world, mediated by a well-socialised reality-principle. In this picture the fundamental parameter is feeling, consciousness is carved out of feeling, the more feeling there is the grander the mass there is to be shaped and the richer the shapes that can be created in it. There are internal flaws to this picture, such as the greater vividness of childhood consciousness, but consider also that the world of experience is made out of the elaboration of clear distinctions and that such distinctions do not exist in pure feeling. You can't actually create ideas out of feelings, but it's far more plausible to argue that you can create feelings out of ideas. If ideas are fundamental then you don't arise out of a complexification of feeling but out of a simplification and reduction in intellect. Consider that the basic stuff of things is ideas, consider the implications of this reversal of the picture.