Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Why Feeling is the Key to Consciousness

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Alexis Madrigal (1:32)

Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's a lot of talk about consciousness these days. The better computers get at simulating people and doing cognitive work, the more us humans seem to be focusing on what might make us a little bit special, which is the subjective experience we have being conscious individuals.

But maybe consciousness is just about computation, some people argue. And if it is, doesn't that mean that setting up a computer in the right way would make it conscious? They think consciousness is substrate independent, which is to say you could do it in silicon as easily as in cells and living beings.

What these accounts and questions lack is a grounding in the realities of our bodies. And it is in that flesh that Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness lives. We're not conscious, he argues in a new book, because of our massive cerebral cortex, but because of the older nervous system networks of the body, which help keep us alive through the process of homeostasis. As he puts it in the book, consciousness is a welcome side effect of the indispensable process of regulating life. There's a radical idea in the current study of consciousness, and it has some heavy implications on how far conscious experience extends throughout the evolutionary tree. It's laid out in the book, Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness. Of course, Antonio Damasio joins us this morning. He's a Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where he's Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute. Welcome, Antonio.

Antonio Damasio (3:07)

My pleasure. Good to be here.

Alexis Madrigal (3:09)

So let's just start with, for our listeners, a little breathing exercise. Everyone out there can just inhale, feel your breath, feel your heart rate, feel the sort of your internal state. When we feel into that, Antonio, what are we actually feeling? Like, what's happening?

Antonio Damasio (3:28)

Well, we're creating very good descriptions of the state of our interior. You know, we really, we live in a body, which is made of living cells and tissues, and we are getting some kind of purchase on the state of our body, the state of our life at that given moment.

And it's something that we can, we normally leave that aside. We don't, except for people who practice meditation, by the way, I'm not one of them, but at any rate, people tend not to concentrate on what's there before all the very interesting stuff that is happening in our day to day, the connections we have with places and with people and so forth. But it's there, and it's there in ways in which I tend to describe as feelings of existence and feelings of the life state. The feelings of existence actually are very interesting because they have to do with breathing, with our heartbeat, without the temperature of our bodies, and we hardly ever concentrate on them unless something is going wrong. So, if you're sick and you've got a fever, then you concentrate on that, but otherwise you don't. And then you have all of these other feelings that I call homeostatic feelings, because they have to do with the regulation of life, which has this technical term homeostasis, and they include things such as hunger, thirst, well-being, malaise, pain, and these are all things that we feel, hopefully not pain, every day, but the others, we feel them every day. Every day we can be in states that we describe as well-being, or states that we describe as not so good.