Feeling & Knowing
Antonio Damasio
Pantheon, $26
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes that the hyperlink between mind and physique is the important thing to understanding consciousness. In his newest e book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, he explains why.
Consciousness is what provides a person a way of self; it helps one keep within the current, keep in mind the previous and plan for the long run. Many scientists have argued that consciousness is created by huge networks of nerve cells, or neurons, within the mind. While it’s clear that the mind performs a serious function in acutely aware experiences, it doesn’t act alone, argues Damasio, director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute.
Instead, he argues, consciousness is generated by quite a lot of constructions inside an organism, some neural, some not. What’s extra, emotions — psychological experiences of physique states — assist join the mind to the remainder of the physique. “The feelings that we have of, say, hunger or thirst, or pain, or well-being, or desire, etc. — these are the foundation of our mind,” Damasio says. In his view, emotions have performed a central function within the life-regulating processes of animals all through the historical past of life.
In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio means that consciousness developed as a strategy to hold important bodily methods regular. This idea is also called homeostasis, a self-regulating course of that maintains stability amid ever-changing circumstances. Consciousness emerged as an extension of homeostasis, Damasio argues, permitting for flexibility and planning in complicated and unpredictable environments.
Science News spoke with Damasio about why emotions are essential to understanding consciousness, why consciousness will not be unique to people and whether or not it’s one thing a pc may ever have. The following dialog has been edited for readability and brevity.
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SN: Why is knowing homeostasis so essential to understanding consciousness?
Damasio: Homeostasis is central to the complete operation. It’s why we developed consciousness. Once we entry feeling, we will then get a psychological image of how the state of life actually is in our organism. So, we will get a warning that issues are going incorrect, and we get struggling. Or, we get a sign that issues are fairly OK, and we will afford to do different issues, which is what occurs with optimistic emotions. So I can afford to have this dialog with you as a result of I’m not having a fever; I’m not terribly thirsty, hungry, or I’m not in ache.
SN: How do emotions assist an organism handle life?
Damasio: Feelings are representations of the state of your physique. To have a sense of ache, pleasure, well-being, illness, thirst, starvation or need is to generate an image of some components of your organs. For instance, the sensation of well-being is said to parameters you can find and measure. This is one thing that we will analyze; we will really research it within the laboratory. Numerous what can be described as [the feeling of] well-being is said to the straightforward musculature that’s round blood vessels in organs, just like the abdomen, the intestine and so forth. And even muscular skeletal parts of our physique, how they’re: Are they contracted? Are they distended, a big half, or not a lot? What we’re feeling from well-being is, in truth, describing states of our physique; that’s what emotions are about. So the basis of feeling within the state of the organism is unquestionable.
SN: How did the nervous system allow the coordination of various methods within the physique?
Damasio: Once organisms grew to become increasingly complicated, it was very troublesome to keep up coordination [among respiration, digestion and other systems]. Having a system that runs a survey of the entire organism is a superb benefit. With that grasp coordinator, the nervous system, got here the potential of producing [internal] representations [of one’s self]. We needed to have nervous methods to have some type of mapping of various components of the physique. Out of that, a picture was generated, and a brand new improvement, which is a thoughts linked to the physique. The total story of consciousness can be a story that the physique is telling about itself. Consciousness didn’t emerge from the get-go. It was not out there, for instance, in micro organism, or quite simple organisms.
SN: You argue that consciousness is unlikely to be unique to people.
Damasio: Right. We have completely different lineages in evolution, but it surely doesn’t imply that different creatures don’t have the potential of attending to consciousness. Take, for instance, the octopus. They have extraordinarily complicated behaviors. I’d be flabbergasted if somebody stated they aren’t acutely aware. They have all of the hallmarks of creatures that have been capable of develop a thoughts and have a way of who they’re and an consciousness of shield themselves.
SN: In the long run, may machines and computer systems be acutely aware?
Damasio: For robots to be acutely aware, we would wish to present them a little bit of vulnerability that they don’t have [right now]. If you may introduce into a pc one thing that might be homeostatic and regulatory — that might permit it to sense deviations — then you definately can be on the way in which to creating emotions for the pc, and it may detect its personal interior states.
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