Antonio Damasio: Consciousness starts in a surprising place

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Alan Alda (0:50)

I'm Alan Alda, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Antonio Damasio (1:01)

When you look back into evolution, there came this possibility of having a feeling, of knowing directly, know in betweens, the state of life in your body. When that happened, nature and evolution said, that's it. If it weren't for feelings, we would not be able to have consciousness. We would not be able to know about ourselves. We would not be able to have a sense of the unity of our mind and the placement of our mind in our bodies. That's natural intelligence. And of course, I wanted to establish a distinction between our natural intelligence and the fact that we're now so obsessed with artificial intelligence, which we created ourselves out of our natural intelligence.

Alan Alda (1:54)

That's Antonio Damasio. He's a renowned neuroscientist who's argued for many years that contrary to what Descartes said, the mind and the body are not separable entities.

He's now brought this awareness to the thorny problem of consciousness.

While most attempts to understand consciousness claim that it is a special feature of our complex brains, he argues in a new book that it's the feelings generated by our bodies that make us conscious.

You know, it seems to me that for centuries, feelings and emotion were disdained as a part of thinking. They got in the way, right? Yeah. Reason was the only thing that counted, especially to Descartes, and not anymore. And you've been instrumental, you've been maybe the main source of that shift.

Antonio Damasio (2:47)

Well, I'm happy I contributed, because it really is a rather disgraceful attitude in relation to humanity, because so much of what we are is in fact about feeling, in particular, and about emotion as well. And I think that reason has been a little bit overvalued. Let's put it this way.

Alan Alda (3:09)

Well, tell me, what is so important about feelings? Most of us have grown up under the dictate that you're smarter if you talk reasonably than if you talk emotionally or from your feelings.

What contribution do feelings make that's irreplaceable?

Antonio Damasio (3:25)

Everything. The contribution of feelings is really outstanding, and it has not only been undervalued or forgotten in the traditional Cartesian approach.

And in fact, in the book that you have been reading, it's a book where I make that claim, and I point to the fact that if it weren't for feelings, we would not be able to have consciousness. We would not be able to know about ourselves. We would not be able to have a sense of the unity of our mind and the placement of our mind in our bodies. So feelings are really outstanding. The other thing that is very, very important and is sort of chronically missed is the fact that feelings are sort of at the bottom, at the beginning of what is sentient life.

And most of the time, for reasons that have to do with what you pointed out, this tradition of rationality, people have looked for consciousness in the highest components of our minds, and in the highest parts of our nervous system. And I mean, this goes back to some of the brilliant minds of the previous century. I'm talking, for example, about Francis Crick, who was easily one of the people I most admire on earth, a brilliant man, and who was entirely taken by the high abilities that we have in our reason, the high abilities we have in the highest part of our nervous system, which is the cerebral cortex. And I remember him saying, look, Antonio, the most remarkable thing that we have in our organisms is the cerebral cortex. This marvel that allows us to see and think and reason and talk, communicate, all of this, this is the highest, most subtle and most refined component of our organisms. So consciousness, which is something that is really amazing because it allows us to know about ourselves, to know of our existence, must be based on the cerebral cortex.