Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century. Charles Darwin famously applied the theory of evolution and natural selection to the study of human communication in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Charles Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his theory of evolution. He proposed that much like other traits found in humans and animals, emotions, also, evolved and were adapted over time. His work looked at not only facial expressions in both humans and animals, but attempted to point out parallels between behaviors in animals and in humans. It’s this area of science that author and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has focused on for much of his life. As he has done previously, Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) explores the process that leads to consciousness. Moreover, as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. Antonio Damasio draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Antonio Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Antonio Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts.

"The time will come when the issue of human responsibility, in general moral terms as well as on matters of justice and its application, will take into account the evolving science of consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Emotions proper are merely an integrated crown jewel of life regulation."

"In a generation that has grown up multitasking, in the digital age, the upper limits of attention in the human brain are being rapidly raised, something that is likely to change certain aspects of consciousness in the not-too-distant future, if it has not done so already. Breaking the glass ceiling of attention has obvious advantages, and the associate abilities generated by multitasking are a terrific advantage; but there may be trade-off costs in terms of learning, memory consolidation, and emotion. We have no idea what these costs may be."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Which kind of consciousness is primordial? Is the self fundamental for consciousness, as Damasio suggests? Or does awareness come when we take in information without having to do anything about it, and is the attending and planning self merely an elaborate construction on top of that, as the Buddhists or David Hume would argue?"

- Alison Gopnik, Slate.com

In November 2010, Alison Gopnik wrote “How Weird Is Consciousness? Scientists may not even be asking the right questions.” for the Slate.com: Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who has done illuminating research on emotion, decision-making, and our perception of our own bodies. He was also one of the brave early researchers who tackled the problem of consciousness head-on, and he was rewarded by several successful popular books. Unfortunately, in Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio seems to have jumped the shark. The book doesn't include either the new scientific research of the last 10 years or new philosophical clarity—although the style is readable, if a bit high-flown, it's often hard to make out the arguments. Instead, the book is a rather wandering and digressive restatement, with some minor variations, of Damasio's earlier views on consciousness. […] The trouble with Damasio's hypothesis, as with all the hypotheses about capital-C Consciousness, is figuring out how you could test it. There is only one organism that I'm sure is conscious (namely, me), and there are only a few more organisms that tell me they are also conscious (namely, my fellow humans), though I'm pretty sure that my other fellow animals are conscious, too. Just to make things worse, the more you think about it, the less sure you are about the nature of your own consciousness, let alone that of other organisms. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has collected many examples that shake your belief that you always know about your own experiences. For example, were you conscious a moment ago of the feeling of your feet in your shoes? You are now, of course, but were you before I made you think about it?

"As humans debate the benefits or perils of cultural trends, and of developments such as the “digital revolution,” it may help to be informed about how our flexible brains create consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain