> How close can the nature of mind be brought to its chemical reactive component?

This question is partially tendentious if it makes the presumption that the chemistry in our central nervous system is purely "reactive". Effects are caused by previous effects, but become active causes for further effects.

To answer the question, with both phenomenology (the experiential side) and biological process in mind, I believe we should first of all consider physical pain (and various ways to block pain). Next, we should consider emotions such as wonder or surprise, i.e. an emotion that is not a full emotion, but rather a pre-emotional state signalling a violation of expectations of which the subject only becomes aware by feeling surprised. Pain is the most basic emotion (and in a way the most elusive one). Surprise is the start of consciousness.

The philosophical question is why do I _feel_ pain, i.e. feel it as "my" pain?<sup>A</sup> The only answer to that is (similar to the one given in Buddhism) that there is no conceptual distinction here: "me" and "my pain" define eachother. Pain is that which, at the most basic level, _subjectivizes_ me, it defines the boundaries of the (bodily) "self". Functionally it is a demand for self-preservation. 

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(A) We actually don't just feel pain as purely "my" pain. It's impossible, unless you've numbed yourself, not to feel some pain when you see another creature in pain, especially one of your own species or one that is more similar to you. Spinoza already noted this in [Ethics, III, prop. XXVII][1]:
> PROP. XXVII. By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion (affectus).

From which he derived as one corollary:
> We seek to free from misery, as far as we can, a thing which we pity.

And we know that this has a neurological basis in the [Mirror Neuron System][2]. (The formal equivalent in a mathematical model would, I think, be a _fixed point_.)


  [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap03
  [2]: https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/tuj66qxb/release/1