The Feeling of What Happens (Damasio)

    Antonio Damasio The Feeling of what Happens. (1999) Damasio attempts to account for the neurology of consciousness. He points out there are two questions about consciousness: a) what is it like? and b) How does the brain create it? He addresses the second one.
     Essentially, what he says is as follows. At the most primitive level, the body receives input from the environment, and responds. The responses consist of both changes within the organism and actions by it. At the next level, the nervous system creates images or maps of both the sensory input and the body state. It uses the first to direct its actions (fight or flight), and the second to potentiate the action. This means that certain changed body states are linked to certain objects.
     The next stage is to link the changes in body state together with the object: this is emotion. In future, the organism will exhibit the emotion when encountering the object again. Now it becomes possible to create what Damasio calls second order maps: an image of the body state is maintained, and updated as new information in the form of emotions, new objects, and new actions is produced. The continually updated image of the body and its state he calls the proto-self. The associated feeling he calls core-consciousness.
     When the nervous system creates an image of itself processing the information in the proto-self and in core-consciousness, we have full consciousness. This would be a third-order map. In humans, the existence of language, memory, and so on results in two more levels of consciousness: the auto-biographical self, and extended consciousness (which may be the same: Damasio is fuzzy about this.)
     So, in essence, consciousness consists of the brain creating images of itself processing information that it has received both from the body and from its own internal processing. Simplified, creatures with sufficiently complex brains have emotions, those with more complexity have awareness of emotion or feeling, and those with the most complex have awareness of their awareness, or consciousness. Insofar as emotion is an image of the body’s states, feelings an image of the emotions, and consciousness an image of the feelings, consciousness is also an image, ie, an illusion. This is Dennett’s point, but Damasio rightly emphasise that the images really exist, in the form of patterned firing of neural assemblies.
    Damasio’s account persuades me. I’ve read Descartes Error, in which he argues that reason alone is insufficient to enable choice and therefore insufficient to produce action. Emotion is the driving force. That book was elegantly and clearly written. This one is turgid, repetitive, and overly technical. It is academic, in other words. Still, it is a useful book, because it is a neurologists’ attempt to link the processes of mind to brain functions. As an attempt or first approximation, it succeeds. Damasio is careful to distinguish between hypothesis and fact, between observations and explanations. He offers his account as his theory, tries (usually successfully) to show where he agrees and where he differs with other researchers, and tries (not so successfully) to address the lay reader.
     The most interesting of his claims is that consciousness arises in the oldest parts of the brain. Damage to these (eg, brain stem, cingulate, etc) impairs consciousness in ways that damage to so-called higher structures (eg, frontal cortex, the language areas) does not. If he is right (and I see no reason why not), then all creatures with brains have some sort of proto-self, and those with more complex brains will have core-consciousness. That is, they will have emotions, and some of them will have feelings. This means that the anthropocentrics, who ascribe human personalities to animals, are partly right.
     Excellent content, so-so style. ***