Why Consciousness Needs a Body

Michael Shermer (0:00)

What is consciousness? How does this differ from, I don't know, sentience or something like that? And what's the hard problem?

Antonio Damasio (0:06)

Consciousness is really this possibility we have of knowing of our own existence and realizing that there is a world where others exist as well. But the key is really the discovery of our own existence. That's the central definition of consciousness. When you talk about emotion and feeling, you're not really talking about the same thing. Let me make the following point of clarity. An emotion is something that you can see or hear in somebody else. I call an emotion an instance of theater. Emotion, as the name implies, is about movement. It is about movement directed at the outside, emotere in Latin. You're doing theater for somebody else that will hear you or will see you. Feelings are private. It's inner. It's not visible or audible to anyone around us. I would not deny the possibility of some form of consciousness in AI systems, which I don't think we have yet, but I would not deny that possibility. What I deny is that it looks at all or it would look at all like our consciousness.

Michael Shermer (1:22)

Hey, everybody. I'm talking to Antonio Damasio. Here's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show with our returning champion, Antonio Damasio, the legendary neuroscientist from USC. But let me give him a proper introduction here. He's the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, the famous USC.

He's the author of numerous popular and best-selling books on neuroscience, including, I think I've read most of these, Descartes' Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion and Making of Consciousness, Feeling and Knowing, Making Minds Conscious, The Strange Order of Things, Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures, and Looking for Spinoza, Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. And here's the new book just came out this week. The new book is Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness. There it is. Antonio, nice to see you again. And thanks for another great book. I read the whole thing. It was really good. Love this subject. How'd you get interested in study? Just kind of give us the, what's your origin story here? How'd you get interested in studying the brain and mind?

Antonio Damasio (2:39)

Well, that actually came very early when I was in medical school. I think I went to medical school because I wanted to become a neurologist. It's one of those strange things.

And of course, once you are inside neurology, the thing that is most fascinating or was most fascinating for me was understanding brain and mind.

I think if I had not become a neurologist and become interested in this topic, I probably would have been a plain writer. I just wanted to understand how the mind worked. That's really it. And I think, so the order is that I became a physician because I wanted to understand the mind. I became a neurologist because I wanted to understand the mind. So it all became one thing.

Michael Shermer (3:29)

Yeah. Well, I think you're a little ahead of me in the game. I was in psychology graduate school in the late 70s. And I remember the 90s was like the decade of the brain and so on.

Do you sense, given your many books and long history of studying this, we've made some serious progress over the last, I don't know, half century or so in understanding the brain and mind?

Antonio Damasio (3:51)

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. It has been incredible progress.

If you think, especially when I compare it to what was the leading edge at the time I started and what is the leading edge today, it really is a remarkable progress.

And actually, I think we ended up having a decade of the brain because there was so much progress and people really wanted to capitalize on it. But I think that we have been able to get a real sense of how the brain works in general.

And we have a real sense of the connection between brain and mind. Now, the problems remain. I have, for example, been interested in the very central problem of consciousness for a very long time. And what is remarkable is that it's still changing. And for example, you just enumerated several of my books, and the word consciousness is in them. And yet, what's in this last book is different from what's in the previous books. So that gives you an idea of how much the field has changed and how much we have been able to understand in addition to what we already knew. And this book in particular has the schema of a solution to understand consciousness that I didn't have in any of the previous books. And guess what? The key is going to be the word feeling. That's really going to be central.