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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
March 18, 2018
The patient had suffered an absence seizure (a kind of epileptic seizure), followed by a period of automatism. He had been both there and not, awake and behaving, for sure, partly attentive, bodily present, but unaccounted for as a person. Many years later I described the patient as having been “absent without leave,” and that description remains apt.
Being awake, having a mind, and having a self are different brain processes,
I would say that if one is awake and there are contents in one’s mind, consciousness is the result of adding a self function to mind that orients the mental contents to one’s needs and thus produces subjectivity.
Why are emotions such a telltale sign of consciousness? Because the actual execution of most emotions is carried out by the periaqueductal gray (PAG) in close cooperation with the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) and the parabrachial nucleus (PBN), the structures whose ensemble engenders bodily feelings (such as primordial feelings) and the variations thereof that we call emotional feelings.
This is a perfect example, IMO, of appeal-to-physiology. Why are emotions a telltale sign of consciousness? Because they are found in the same structures as feelings? hardly useful.
experiences of bodily feelings are a deep and vital part of consciousness from a first-person, introspective perspective.
At the end of the day, I am ready to take any manifestation of animal behavior that suggests the presence of feelings as a sign that consciousness should not be far behind.
And thus is where we really depart. *Just* having feelings is, in no way, a critical component of consciousness (just as Spock) ... feelings are *just* a component of the on-going modeling, evaluating, deciding, brain.
Understanding the significance of consciousness, and the merits of its emergence in living beings, requires that we take a full measure of what came before, a sense of what living beings with normal brains and fully operational minds were capable of doing before their species came to have consciousness and before consciousness dominated mental life for those who had it.
I like this as an intro to the section on the evolution of consciousness.
Why were consciousness-making brain devices naturally selected? One possible answer, which we will consider at the end of the book, is that generating, orienting, and organizing images of the body and of the outside world in terms of the organism’s needs, increased the likelihood of efficient life management and consequently improved the chances of survival.
Close, but it's really about the predictive model & prescriptive adjustments.
the images contained in knowledge could be recalled and manipulated in a reasoning process that paved the way for reflection and deliberation.
The image-processing machinery could then be guided by reflection and used for effective anticipation of situations, previewing of possible outcomes, navigation of the possible future, and invention of management solutions.
These passages, as obscure as they may be (was it necessary?) essentially sums it up.
Before consciousness, life regulation was entirely automated; after consciousness begins, life regulation retains its automation but gradually comes under the influence of self-oriented deliberations.
Dreams do offer, however, direct evidence of mind processes unassisted by consciousness.
an equally physical construction called self becomes available
Damasio backs a physical 'self'.
“Synchronization of Neural Activity Across Cortical Areas Correlates with Conscious Perception,” Journal of Neuroscience 27, no. 11 (2007), 2858–65.
