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So feelings point within, to the interior images point without, to the world. As Damasio uses the term, “feelings” are “the hybrid, interactive processes of the interior, at once mental and physical.” They register how well or badly its various subsystems are doing at maintaining homeostasis, at keeping the organism alive and flourishing. For that, they must be related to a perspective, an “owner,” a self - this, after all, is what subjectivity means. But these images, by themselves, cannot be conscious. Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio’s brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of “images” that map aspects of the world around us. Still, the quality of the author’s mind, the boldness of his aims and the suspense of his argument propelled me through the book. Crucial ideas often lie enshrouded in an elegant mist of metaphor. “Focused,” though, is not the mot juste for it: Despite its brevity, it can be meandering and repetitious (“Feelings again, must we? We must indeed”). Each of these mini-chapters reads rather like a prose poem - often soaring to lyrical heights, though sometimes weighted down by bits of neuroscientific argot. So he set out to write “a focused and very brief book on consciousness.” Brief the new book is: It consists of 40-odd sections, some less than a page long, surrounded by ample white space. In a prologue, Damasio tells us that readers of his earlier books often missed the key ideas amid all the scientific details. It is feeling, he thinks, that can bridge the conceptual abyss between the physical body and the conscious mind.īefore getting down to substance, a word about style. The most prominent of his preoccupations is the importance of feeling. “Feeling & Knowing” represents a distillation of themes Damasio has explored in earlier books, which include “Descartes’ Error” (1994) and “Self Comes to Mind” (2010). Today, one of the most distinguished researchers working along these lines is Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese American who holds a chair in neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Among them have been the Nobel laureates Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman, each of whom produced a book outlining his own favored take on consciousness. Using brain-imaging and other empirical techniques, they have sought out the neural signatures of conscious thought within the gray spongy matter in our skulls. Meanwhile, neuroscientists have tried to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon - like, say, digestion. In his mega-best-selling “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter argued that consciousness arises when the brain becomes intricate enough to form self-referential “strange loops” - neural equivalents of Gödel’s notorious formula that says, “I am not provable.” The Nobel-laureate physicist Roger Penrose has speculated that some kind of quantum magic might be behind it. Philosophers (Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers) have flirted with “panpsychism,” the idea that consciousness might be a fundamental ingredient of all matter, right down to the atomic level. In the last few decades, the mystery of consciousness has exercised thinkers of all stripes, sometimes driving them to rather desperate-sounding devices. But how can these objective electrochemical events give rise to ineffable qualitative experiences, like the smell of a rose, the stab of a pain or the transport of joy? Why, when a physical system attains a certain degree of complexity, is it “like something” to be that system? Consciousness seems to be caused by neural firings in our brains. It doesn’t readily fit into our scientific conception of the world. Intimately familiar though we are with it, consciousness confronts us with a mystery. In a universe that never evolved conscious minds, nothing would matter. Without consciousness, there would be no pleasure or pain no good or evil no experiences of beauty, or of love. Why is consciousness important? Well, in a way, it’s the basis of everything that’s important. Many animals - probably all mammals - have conscious minds, but plants and bacteria do not. I am now conscious, and so (presumably) are you. Consciousness is what distinguishes being awake from being in a coma or a state of dreamless sleep. We all know what it means to be conscious. FEELING & KNOWING Making Minds Conscious By Antonio Damasio