The writing style was dull and repetitive compared to more recent works on the same topic. Nonfiction has apparently become a lot more readable in the past twenty years. ( )

El estilo es un poco lento y pesado. ( )

Clears up some ways to think about Descartes and his simplified, maybe circular ideas. Still, he did start a philosophical revolution. He wrote in French, for one thing, not Latin. ( )

My rating might be a bit unfair because (without realizing it!) I read the 1994/5 edition. The writing in that version was incredibly technical for someone who did not go to med school or major in chemistry. Nonetheless, the concept of where the "self" resides is fascinating. Also, a heck of a lot of neurological research has been done since 1995. I would be interested in the new edition once I flipped through and convinced myself that the author had a new editor. ( )

Have read for school and still remember some parts, a basic book to understand António Damasio and dont not so easy to understand as scientific (but it makes part of the science to be not so easy to understand). A case very well explained and have to publically rated it because why not ( )

Didn't hold much new information for me, because its contents have grown so accepted and foundational in the 25 years since publication. Nevertheless it provides a solid fundamental overview in a very readable way, despite also dealing in a bit of technical details. ( )

The accounts of how different types of brain damage affect decision making and emotion are really fascinating, and I enjoyed the discussions of the role of emotion in decision-making and of the close interrelationship of body and mind.

(Original Review, 1994-11-17)

Dave Chalmers did a great job of making consciousness popular but his own view was 400 years out of date. Descartes is the real rigorous physicist here - he was after all one of the people who devised physics. What he meant by the soul and God being 'spirit' is that they caused matter to move. Matter for Descartes was just the inert occupancy of a space (extension). So physics consisted of the interaction of spirit and matter. We now call spirit 'force' or 'energy' and Descartes was quite right because thinking is all about electromagnetic fluxes - which in themselves do not occupy space or have mass. His mistake was to think that there had to be one special spirit unit. Leibniz sorted that out in 1714.

The problem with neuroscientific theories at present is that they are no longer rigorously mechanistic in the way Descartes was. They ignore the fact that consciousness is the property of having an input, or being influenced, or receiving information. All the current theories try to explain consciousness in terms of cellular activity or output, which makes no sense. Consciousness must be something to do with cellular input - in dendrites.

There is an intriguing reflection of this in the literature. Kripke suggestd that one form of consciousness, pain, might be C fibre stimulation (an input to C fibres) which is reasonable but he and everyone else expected the stimulation to be higher up. Then Papineau changed it to C fibre FIRING (an output) which no longer makes any sense. Pain is not me saying ouch! Percepts are not firings, they are stimulations of something.

If the neuroscientists took a bit more notice of 17th century philosophy and a bit less of 20th century then they might get on the right track.

I know that I am, but I do not remember how I started being. Was it like a switch being pulled, or a gradual transition? But even a gradual transition starts at some point... Similarly, how did the universe start existing? Even the big bang cannot fully explain it. What created the big bang? What created that first particle whose explosion caused the universe? Some theories say that new universes are being created all the time, but even that is just a way of describing a later stage, not the beginning. And if God created this universe, then who created God? It all comes down to the fact that something must have come out of nothing. It could be that we cannot explain that under our current scientific paradigm. It could also be that our brains will never be able to understand that.

Those are the fundamental questions. There is something to panpsychism, because if my consciousness and the universe were both created out of nothing, the elegant solution would be to declare them as being part of one thing. And I've been thinking, that if something must come out of nothing, then the most scientific explanation for such a phenomenon would be that nature abhors a vacuum, so that as soon as there is the tiniest space without magnetic fields/gravity/matter/energy then something is being created. This something would then have to be something very 'light', because as soon as it comes into being, the vacuum disappears and the process of creation stops. I could imagine that this 'lowest layer' of existence that constitutes our universe is a level of consciousness. Some would call this consciousness God.

I am sure that somewhere in the midsts of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Physics theory, Laws of Thermodynamics, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and String Theory and M-Theory, there has got to be at the very least one of the following...

Consciousness resides in molecules and billions of years from now those molecules could reassemble and the person could 'live' again as the Laws of Thermodynamics say energy cannot be destroyed just change form. Or at best consciousness goes to the extra dimensional worlds in M and String Theory and live there, a scientific 'afterlife', or the 90 odd % of matter known as Dark Matter and Dark Energy could also be a scientific 'afterlife', or Quantum Mechanics 'double slit experiment' observation mysteries could.

On the other hand, consciousness is an emergent property of, and therefore, reliant upon the human brain. Once the physical body and brain dies, the consciousness of the person ceases to exist.

All the research and evidence to date confirms consciousness is an entirely physical process residing only in the brain, therefore your research into "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Physics theory, Laws of Thermodynamics, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and String Theory and M-Theory" to find this 'afterlife' is an exercise in futility.

Most neuro-scientists still use a very materialistic framework for trying to understand consciousness. I think Penrose had the right idea in trying to bring the idea of consciousness up to date with the latest view of the Universe in terms of Modern physics. I think that the problem is that most neuro-scientists do not really understand the implications of Quantum Theory and General Relativity and therefore still stick to what they have learned in High School. And of course they should also take account of the fact that consciousness is a non-computable process and is therefore quite distinct from a computer. I think the last people who should be talking about what consciousness actually is are neuro-scientists. They are far too limited in their intellectual framework (Penrose (or anyone else as far as I know) has failed to show that consciousness is non-algorithmic. [2018 EDIT: Whatever you think of him otherwise, Dennett covers these flaws very well in some of his books.]

I look at brain activity like a spherical sheet of graph paper. To get from one point on the periphery to another diagonally opposite there are myriads of pathways which we can use but there is one, usually the result of an epiphany, which is the most direct or shortest or most ergonomic. Once we have found that answer to the "hard problems" we inevitably wonder why it was so simple and we were so stupid as not to see it ages ago.

We often seem able to pass on this trick of a pathway to others and form a "collective consciousness" or "race memory". It may be the interconnectedness or integration that is suggested but it is organic and forever changing as circuits fail and generate.

It seems to me a more than hard question because if consciousness is a pathway that develops, decays and changes and because the only way to measure it is with that constantly changing measuring apparatus we will always get different answers for every person at every time.

Maybe someone will have an epiphany and we can all stop thinking and die out?

It would help if there were an accepted definition of the concept of "consciousness" - but, alas, there seems to be no agreement on the central tenets of what constitutes consciousness, and those promulgated are as numerous and varied as the people espousing them.

All the while people conflate the minds (emotional) response to, say, the landscape of Greenland with the mystery of "the soul" or invoke "spirituality" (that other favourite of people who have no understanding of science) then the rationalist world of biology/chemistry/physics will never get a look in.

It seems to me that a lot of those in favour of consciousness being seen as something "special" are in the same camp as the flat Earth brigade, those who favour the ideas behind "intelligent design", and those who regard Darwin as a heretic worthy of immolation.

The essence of the those who object to seeing the mind as a machine, that functions according to some unseen (if sometimes erratic) programme, seems to centre on the idea that it denies the idea of the uniqueness of the individual and the concept of free will. Yet the entire discipline of psychology is predicated on the notion that the human mind has any number of fundamental modes of action which are definable, repeatable, observable, and capable of being modified through a set of pre-defined external factors and stimuli.

The reality of current computer technology is that it cannot hold a candle to the sheer complexity and interconnectedness of the brains neural pathways. Until out technology starts to approach the level found in the brains of mammals, and we can begin to formulate theories that can be tested, there will those who will feel to need to resort to "mysticism" to explain the unknown. As the article makes plain, the human race has form for this, and the search for consciousness is just the latest example in a long line of allegedly insoluble problems that are the "meat and drink" of those intent on selling us "snake oil".

The human observes there is a river in a whirlpool. The universe knows no boundary between the river and the whirlpool - there is only the river. It gets worse - The universe knows no boundary between the human observer of the river and the river - there is only the universe. It gets a lot worse - the river, the whirlpool and the human observer are merely "data" "Zeroes and ones" (use whatever words you like - the universe can't actually be broken down into words. Human language is a fun tool inside reality but is not actually reality. The number 47 doesn't exist inside any universe - it is a man-made thing, a symbol.) They don't actually exist.

You're not a ping pong ball inside a box with 6 billion other ping pong balls bouncing around. You're the box itself - the infinite box which creates the ping pong balls. The human simply got confused by the body, possibly in very early childhood when it learns that it is > and mummy is . Mistaking each body for something that had to exist inside the universe but yet somehow separate from everything else. Observe your feet inside the universe - wherever you go they exist and yet if you chop them off, you will carry on - 100% actual hard proof there is no you contained within your feet.

This is your dream.

Probably.

Run the experiments on yourself to prove or disprove it for yourself.

And another thing:

Complexity does strange things. A random assortment of entities can seem to give rise to an entity. Something that is "one" - such as the random forces of tide and wind producing waves. Not the best example. Or the random collection of atoms that make up the sun. This is a thing which rises every day, lights the world, and goes back to bed again. And many civilisations have thought the sun had an identity, and a conscience. We have no extra esoteric spark of brilliant. We do have a magical identity which is the result of mind-boggling complexity. And how the sense of self appears when the brain gets into gear in the morning may one day be understood a bit better. My guess is there will be distributed activity through memory, senses and sensory input, and maybe motion that starts up and has the subject saying crap.

I think there are some quite muddled thoughts regarding "free will". I see it primarily as a question concerning the boundaries of the cognitive system that ends up making the choice. If it is primarily the stuff inside the limits of your body that processes the information and arrives at a choice, it seems reasonable to say that you made the choice "of your own free will": there was no coercing outside agent, for example.

But things can still get a little fuzzy. No man is a cognitive island; there will always be an information processing dance between the states in your brain and the state in the outside world coming in as sensory data. If I see an obstacle ahead and steer to the left to avoid it, one can make a strong case that it's the combination of me and the obstacle together that generated the action. But if we go down that particular path we may end up deciding that the universe as a whole is responsible for every action that takes place. From a certain point of view this is entirely true, but I'm not sure how helpful it is.

There are other curiosities such as the fact that if you were castrated you would start to make slightly different decisions, suggesting that your gonads were to some extent some "other", some outside agent influencing your decisions, rather than being a part of you. But, again, clear boundaries are hard to define. If a small chunk of your brain were removed, the exact same thing might be true. It is very hard to define the self as some single thing, some single point that is you.

They summed this all up years ago:

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

‘Hey, I'm awake now! Is there a cup of tea, somewhere?’

NB: Damásio is a fellow Portuguese. ( )

Antonio Damasio analiza en profundidad las teorías del Descartes y afirma que el filósofo estaba completamente equivocado sobre su dualismo mente y cuerpo, utilizando como ejemplo a pacientes que exhibían daños en la corteza prefrontal. Por medio de estos casos descubrió que la razón, al igual que casi todos los procesos mentales, está “encarnada" a la entidad física del ser humano. Las emociones y otros estados arraigados en lo físico influyen profundamente en el modo en que razonan. Sin ellas, las personas no pueden tomar decisiones o toman decisiones contraproducentes. Este libro explica cómo Damasio creó, desarrolló y contrastó su teoría de “cognición encarnada,” que en la actualidad ejerce gran influencia en las áreas de psicología, neurociencia y economía conductual. Es un libro escrito al estilo de relato y es ameno y refrescante (aunque a veces arbitrario, por lo que ha de ser tomado con cuidado en una investigación experimental) ( )

Can we really “free” our reasoning minds from emotional contexts in our thought processes? Writing in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes thought so (or at least I think he thought so, based on the bits and pieces of Meditations I vaguely remember reading). However, as the title of this book implies, Damasio believes otherwise. The product of a cognitive neurologist, Descartes’ Error offers a relatively non-technical description of how our brains work, as well as when and why they do not.

Some of the material the author develops proved to be a lot more than I wanted to know and a few of the concepts are apparently a little dated. Still, he makes an effective case for the proposition that rationality has no context without emotion; this in turn suggests that psychological factors can and must matter in our understanding of economic activity and decision-making. At the very least, if you read this book you will know why the pain of Phineas P. Gage’s—the railroad worker who survived a spike being driven through his skull—turns out to be our gain. ( )

Very dry, very difficult reading. The "error" of the book has to do with the statement, "I think, therefore I am." Damasio says that because we are, we think -- that it evolved. Frankly, I think they're both wrong and Popeye is right. "I am what I am and that's all what I am! Hyuck! Hyuck! Hyuck! Hyuck! Hyuck!" ( )

A fascinating tour through some now sadly slightly dated research into brain function. This was the book which popularised the story of Phineas Gage, and it tells the story very well; much of the subsequent sections of the book advance Damasio's own "somatic marker hypothesis", which now seems somewhat laboured in light of its current general acceptance. Still, a useful book to read if you're trying to understand the background to much current neurological research. ( )

Antonio Damasio presents a very central thesis in modern philosophy of mind: the interdependence of mind and body, with an extremely solid argumentation from neurology. Along the way he gives a brilliant introduction to neurology (especially the parts relevant for his argumentation and especially his own work).

I can recommend this book both to people interested in neurology ("and please not to much philosophical waffling") and philosophy of mind, as well as the general reader, as it is a very well-written book that will make anybody a little wiser on what it is to be human. ( )

Ler o livro finalmente desiludiu-me. Estava à espera de um livro de divulgação científica, não de um tratado académico. ( )

I’ve been reading Damasio “backwards”. One of the first books I read three years ago to try to understand the neuroscientific view of consciousness was Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness published in 1999. That gave me a solid grounding in Damasio’s view of embodied consciousness, which has become a foundation of my thinking. Later, I came across Damasio’s paper on the somatic marker hypothesis, which powerfully rejects the idea that abstract thinking can take place without a direct connection to the body’s bio-regulatory processes.

With this context, when I finally read Descartes’ Error, (probably Damasio’s most cited book), it had some of the characteristics of a quaint, historical document, making the case for embodied cognition as though it were a radical new idea: “Surprising as it may sound, the mind exists in and for an integrated organism.” I guess that shows the enormous impact Damasio himself (and others such as Edelman, LeDoux, etc.) have had in changing perceptions about consciousness in a mere fifteen years. Thanks to these ground-breaking neuroscientists, “we’ve come a long way, baby.”

I can only agree with the array of distinguished names that cite Descartes’ Error as a key book for understanding human consciousness. Through Damasio, Phineas Gage has become a household name (in certain households!) – the emblematic tragic figure whose prefrontal cortex was severely damaged in 1848, and whose consequent experiences paved the way for the neurological understanding of the prefrontal importance in regulation of emotion, complex decision-making and general executive functioning.

I think there are two fundamental take-aways from Damasio’s classic: (1) the mind is embodied and without this foundation, no approaches to higher cognitive functions or theories of consciousness have much validity, and (2) the prefrontal cortex (pfc) is the crucial mediator between our “innate regulatory circuits” and our self-aware consciousness, with its attributes of reason, willpower, symbolization, abstraction, etc.

Damasio’s work is a significant resource for my research project. However, an initial impression of my thesis of “the tyranny of the pfc” might be that it’s incompatible with Damasio. After all, if the pfc is the key bridge between bodily regulation and self-awareness, how can there be a “tyranny” of the pfc? And what sense does my distinction of conceptual and animate consciousness make if conceptual consciousness is fundamentally connected with animate consciousness? In fact, though, my approach is not only consistent with Damasio, it relies squarely on the work of Damasio and others for its evidence.

My argument is not that an individual’s prefrontal cortex is, by itself, a “tyrant” of our consciousness, but that our Western cultural milieu, imposed on an infant’s perceptions before s/he has even learned to speak, shapes the individual brain in such a way that our sense of identity and values give an inappropriate priority to pfc-mediated attributes (such as planning, reason, abstraction, logic, etc.) at the expense of a balanced self-identity emphasizing such attributes as integrated mind/body experience or full awareness of the present moment.

Here’s a key passage from the book which relates to my notion of a split between animate and conceptual consciousness:

From an evolutionary perspective, the oldest decision-making device pertains to basic biological regulation; the next, to the personal and social realm; and the most recent, to a collection of abstract-symbolic operations under which we can find artistic and scientific reasoning, utilitarian-engineering reasoning, and the developments of language and mathematics. But although ages of evolution and dedicated neural systems may confer some independence to each of these reasoning/decision-making ‘modules,’ I suspect they are all interdependent.

What Damasio describes as the “collection of abstract-symbolic operations” is essentially the same as my idea of “conceptual consciousness.” As he pointedly emphasizes, they are “interdependent.” But Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes and the whole momentum of Western civilization have idealized the conceptual consciousness as “the soul,” as the proof of our very existence, and as the foundation for science and civilization. It’s only when we begin to re-balance our values to give equal import to our bodily existence that we can begin to move towards a ‘democracy of consciousness.’

So thanks, Antonio Damasio, for your ground-breaking classic. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in gaining a serious understanding of human consciousness. ( )

30 November 1999
I know Tony Damasio slightly from the NINDS Advisory Council; he is always well-dressed and coiffured. His argument in this popular work is that the ability of the brain to judge emotional states and motivations of other individuals is the work of the prefrontal cortex. The lack of this ability contributes to the problems that frontal lobe injured patients have in making decisions. He argues that the mechanisms of reasoning must include a reference to, or integration of, information in the brain on the body states that represent the emotional and physiological responses to various decisions. In this way the brain can establish a hierarchy of significance of actions before taking appropriate decisions. Damasio proposes that this integration of emotional body states and logical decision trees is done in the prefrontal cortex. The argument seems, often, self-evident, and his data are largely anecdotal, but this is a very interesting book. ( )

1 - Somatic-marker hypothesis posits that emotions/feelings are integral to reasoning, not an obstacle or impedence to it.

2 - Hints that the self, broadly understood, is predicated upon emotions/feelings as defined by Damasio

3 - Emotions defined as body-states (somatic states, e.g. heart rate, skin temperature) that broadly indicate danger or health to the organism

4 - Feelings are conscious monitoring of emotions; draw correlations between emotions and external circumstances

Does not cite Julian Jaynes but would be curious to read of the extent to which these very different theories are compatible or contradictory.

UPDATE 2014
From an article reviewing what is known of Phineas Gage, and what fabricated:
"The Damasios still stand behind their paper [in Science 1994, recreating Gage's injury and how the brain was impacted]. But two later studies, which took advantage of higher-horsepower computers to create more accurate models of Gage’s skull, have since questioned their results. In 2004, a team led by Peter Ratiu, who was then teaching neuroanatomy at Harvard and now works as an emergency doctor in Bucharest, Romania, concluded that the rod could not have crossed over the midline and damaged Gage’s right hemisphere. What’s more, Ratiu determined that, based on the angle of entry and lack of a broken jawbone, Gage must have had his mouth open and been speaking at the moment of impact. Ratiu’s renderings of this moment—with the iron rod piercing a gaping mouth—have an unnerving quality, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s paintings of screaming popes.

"In 2012, neuroimaging expert Jack Van Horn led another study on Gage’s skull. [...] Van Horn’s study sifted through millions of possible trajectories for the iron rod, he says, and ruled out all but a few “that didn’t break his jaw, didn’t blow his head off, and didn’t do a bunch of other things.” (For comparison, the Damasio study scrutinized a half-dozen trajectories.) Overall, Van Horn’s work supported Ratiu’s: The rod, he argues, never crossed over to the right hemisphere."

[slate.com 2014-05, Sam Kean, "Phineas Gage"] ( )

Damasio's hypothesis is that the process of reason is deeply linked and influenced by our 'feeling' and by the processes ongoing in our body. ( )

This book poses a wonderful hypothesis, in opposition to the views espoused by purists of reason in ages past (Plato and Descartes among them): that not only are emotion and feelings quite inextricably interlaced with reason and rationality, they are also essential to reason's proper functioning.

Damasio introduces the reader to the issue at hand by providing case histories like that of Phineas Gage, the famous 19th century railroad worker whose personality underwent profound change on account of a horrific accident in which an iron rod was driven through his skull, resulting in the destruction of a portion of his brain somehow responsible for making sense of critical events arising in the social and personal spheres of his life. Damasio compares Gage with a modern counterpart, a man named "Elliot" who is able "to know but not to feel" (p. 45). Elliot, like Gage, made disastrous decisions, and his life, like that of his 19th century counterpart, spiraled out of control.

What is it that causes such subjects to lose control of their lives? How is it that one can retain one's knowledge, memory, intellect, and power to reason, yet find one's decision-making ability in ruins? How is it that the destruction of neural substance more concerned with "emotional" matters can so profoundly affect "intellectual" ones?

Damasio's central thesis deals with "somatic markers": as neural images of scenarios resulting from potential decisions on our part arise in our minds, unconscious feelings ("background feelings") accompany those images, disposing us to positively or negatively consider the images and the scenarios they represent (see p. 173). The resulting marking narrows our list of potential scenarios by allowing us to discount various options outright, or by strongly encouraging us to pursue various others.

Much of Damasio's book comprises the development of the neural machinery to support this hypothesis, the testing of the hypothesis through experiments performed on Elliot and others with brain damage like his, and the erecting of defenses against possible attacks on the hypothesis.

I've not found this book as engaging as the one that led me to it (Stanislas Dehaene's "The number sense"), but it's been an interesting read nonetheless.

On a personal note, I'm saddened that I most likely won't make it through many more books before Spring Break is over! ( )

Damasio revisits the still widely held Cartesian beliefs about the relationship between mind, brain, and body with the help of modern neuroscience. ( )

Damasio's demonstrations to support his major premise, i.e. that reason without (or separated from) emotion yields a reduced capacity for sound judgment, are sometimes interesting. However, the field of clinical psychology has already long understood this to be the case, as for those who function from a schizoid position, as well as for those persons who consistently fall back upon the obsessive defensive function known as isolation of affect. ( )

http://www.ed-critica.es/detalles_libro.php?ID=954 ( )

It's a brilliant book based on interesting research, and as I understand it, quite revolutionary in its scope and theories. Damasio says that there is no dualism between the mind and the body. Our mind and consciousness stem from the brain and the body likewise since there are millions signals, both conscious and unconscious sent from the body to the mind and vice versa every second. Even such critical `mind' operations as rational decision making can be tied to the cooperation of the mind, body and feelings. In fact, feelings and emotions are critical to decision making, and have a special job providing a bridge between the rational and non-rational processes. They also help us learn, and we supposedly learn more through suffering than through avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. ( )

A fresh and informative look at what goes on in the brain when we think and feel. ( )