The Feeling of What Happens Quotes

“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)”
― Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.”
― Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“The inescapable and remarkable fact about these three phenomena—emotion, feeling, consciousness—is their body relatedness. We begin with an organism made up of body proper and brain, equipped with certain forms of brain response to certain stimuli and with the ability to represent the internal states caused by reacting to stimuli and engaging repertoires of preset response. As the representations of the body grow in complexity and coordination, they come to constitute an integrated representation of the organism, a proto-self. Once that happens, it becomes possible to engender representations of the proto-self as it is affected by interactions with a given environment. It is only then that consciousness begins, and only thereafter that an organism that is responding beautifully to its environment begins to discover that it is responding beautifully to its environment.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Emotion is critical for the appropriate direction of attention since it provides an automated signal about the organism's past experience with given objects and thus provides a basis for assigning or withholding attention relative to a given object. Simple organisms initiate wakeful behavior by having basic image-making capabilities and minimal attention, as a result of which the following happens: first, processing of objects can take place; second, emotion can ensue; third, further enhancement and focusing of attention can occur, or not occur, under the direction of emotion. In organisms capable of consciousness, the above list of events still applies, but the second step would read as follows: "Emotion can ensue and become known to the individual having it.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“When objects appear in mind not because they are immediately present in our surroundings but because we recall them from memory, their images also cause core consciousness. The reason for this has to do with the fact that we store in memory not just aspects of an object's physical structure—the potential to reconstruct its form, or color, or sound, or typical motion, or smell, or what have you—but also aspects of our organism's motor involvement in the process of apprehending such relevant aspects: our emotional reactions to an object; our broader physical and mental state at the time of apprehending the object. As a consequence, recall of an object and deployment of its image in mind is accompanied by the reconstruction of at least some of the images which represent those pertinent aspects. Reconstructing that collection of organism accommodations for the object you recall generates a situation similar to the one that occurs when you perceive an external object directly.6 The net result is that as you think about an object, reconstructing part of the accommodations required to perceive it in the past as well as the emotive responses to it in the past is enough to change the proto-self in much the same manner that I have described for when an external object confronts you directly. The immediate source of the object of which you become conscious is different, in actual perception or recall, but the consciousness of apprehending something is the same, whether perceived or recalled.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“The wordless narrative I propose is based on neural patterns which become images, images being the same fundamental currency in which the description of the consciousness-causing object is also carried out. Most importantly, the images that constitute this narrative are incorporated in the stream of thoughts. The images in the consciousness narrative flow like shadows along with the images of the object for which they are providing an unwitting, unsolicited comment. To come back to the metaphor of movie-in-the-brain, they are within the movie. There is no external spectator.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“n short: As the brain forms images of an object—such as a face, a melody, a toothache, the memory of an event—and as the images of the object affect the state of the organism, yet another level of brain structure creates a swift nonverbal account of the events that are taking place in the varied brain regions activated as a consequence of the object-organism interaction. The mapping of the object-related consequences occurs in first-order neural maps representing proto-self and object; the account of the causal relationship between object and organism can only be captured in second-order neural maps. Looking back, with the license of metaphor, one might say that the swift, second-order nonverbal account narrates a story: that of the organism caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else. But the astonishing fact is that the knowable entity of the catcher has just been created in the narrative of the catching process. This plot is incessantly repeated for every object the brain represents, and it does not matter whether the object is present and interacting with the organism or is being brought back from past memory. It also makes no difference what the object really is. In healthy individuals, as long as the brain is awake, the machines of image making and consciousness are "on," and we are not manipulating our mental state by doing something like meditation, it is not possible to run out of "actual" objects or "thought" objects, and it is thus not possible to run out of the abundant commodity called core consciousness. There are just too many objects, actual or recalled, and often there is more than one object at about the same time.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“How do we ever begin to be conscious? Specifically, how do we ever have a sense of self in the act of knowing? We begin with a first trick. The trick consists of constructing an account of what happens within the organism when the organism interacts with an object, be it actually perceived or recalled, be it within body boundaries (e.g., pain) or outside of them (e.g., a landscape). This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have characters (the organism, the object). It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning corresponds to the initial state of the organism. The middle is the arrival of the object. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism. We become conscious, then, when our organisms internally construct and internallv exhibit a specific kind of wordless knowledge — that our organism has been changed by an object—and when such knowledge occurs along with the salient internal exhibit of an object. The simplest form in which this knowledge emerges is the feeling of knowing, and the enigma before us is summed up in the following question: By what sleight of hand is such knowledge gathered, and why does the knowledge first arise in the form of a feeling? The specific answer I deduced is presented in the following hypothesis: core consciousness occurs when the brain's representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism's own state is affected by the organism's processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“How do we ever begin to be conscious? Specifically, how do we ever have a sense of self in the act of knowing? We begin with a first trick. The trick consists of constructing an account of what happens within the organism when the organism interacts with an object, be it actually perceived or recalled, be it within body boundaries (e.g., pain) or outside of them (e.g., a landscape). This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have characters (the organism, the object). It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning corresponds to the initial state of the organism. The middle is the arrival of the object. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism. We become conscious, then, when our organisms internally construct and internallv exhibit a specific kind of wordless knowledge — that our organism has been changed by an object—and when such knowledge occurs along with the salient internal exhibit of an object.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Dispositions are records which are dormant and implicit rather than active and explicit, as images are. Those dispositional memories of an object that was once actually perceived include not only records of the sensory aspects of the object, such as the color, shape, or sound, but also records of the motor adjustments that necessarily accompanied the gathering of the sensory signals; moreover the memories also contain records of the obligate emotional reaction to the object. As a consequence, when we recall an object, when we allow dispositions to make their implicit information explicit, we retrieve not just sensory data but also accompanying motor and emotional data.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Let us now consider first the situation of an actual something-to-be-known, an actual object. Such an object is implemented in early sensory cortices, those collections of cortices in which signals from the varied sensory channels, such as vision, hearing, and touch, are processed along the many dimensions of an object, such as color, shape, motion, auditory frequencies, and so on. The presence of such signals from an actual object provokes in the organism the sort of response I discussed earlier in this chapter, namely, a collection of motor adjustments required to continue gathering signals about the object as well as emotional responses to several aspects of the object. In other words, the implementation of the something-to-be-known is inevitably accompanied by a complex effect on the proto-self, that is, an effect on the very neural basis of the something-to-which-knowing-is-attributed. Let me repeat that this is enough for being but not enough for knowing, that is, not enough to be conscious. Consciousness, as we shall see, only arises when the object, the organism, and their relation, can be re-represented.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“The brain's exposure to the chemicals that circulate in the bloodstream is remarkable. The brain is protected from the penetration of certain molecules by the so-called blood-brain barrier, a biological filter that envelops virtually all the blood vessels that carry nutrients to the brain tissue and is quite selective about what is or is not allowed to trespass from the blood into the brain tissue. A few brain regions, however, are devoid of blood-brain barrier and easily admit large molecules that, elsewhere in the brain, are kept from influencing the neural tissue directly. Molecules that cross the blood-brain barrier act on the brain directly, at sites like the hypothalamus; large molecules that cannot penetrate the blood-brain barrier get to act on the brain at special sites in which the barrier is missing, the so-called circumventricular organs. Examples of such sites are the area postrema (located in the brain stem) and the subfornical organs (located at cerebral hemisphere level). The chemically excited neurons in these areas pass their messages on to other neurons. The action of substances such as oxytocin, which is critical for a variety of behaviors, from sex and bonding to childbirth, depends on this arrangement. The brain's immersion in the chemical milieu is serious business.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Having a car zooming toward you does cause an emotion called fear, whether you want it or not, and does change many things in the state of your organism—the gut, the heart, and the skin respond quickly, among many others. Let me suggest that the signaling of all the changes I enumerated above are the means to implement individual organism perspective in your mind. Notice that I am not saying they are the means for you to experience organism perspective yet, which would be the same as knowing of it. Experience or knowledge of something, in a word, consciousness, comes later.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand castles on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all, that we have—that most of us have, some of us have—some continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity, some stable traits of behavior we call a personality. Fabulous indeed, amazing for certain, that you are you and I am me.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what is going on elsewhere. The screening is not necessarily intentional—we are not deliberate obfuscators all the time—but deliberate or not, the screen does hide.
One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, but not too well, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Can we, with the assistance of advanced technology and neurobiological facts, create an artifact with consciousness? Perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the question, I have two answers for it, and one is no and the other yes. No, we have little chance of creating an artifact with anything that resembles human consciousness, conceptualized from an inner-sense perspective. Yes, we can create artifacts with the formal mechanisms of consciousness proposed in this book, and it may be possible to say that those artifacts have some kind of consciousness. Some external behaviors of artifacts with formal mechanisms of consciousness will mimic conscious behaviors and may pass a consciousness version of the Turing test. But for all the good reasons that John Searle and Colin McGinn have adduced on the matter of behavior, mind, and the Turing test, passing the test guarantees little about the artifact's mind. More to the point, the artifact's internal states may even mimic some of the neural and mental designs I propose here as a basis for consciousness. They would have a way of generating second-order knowledge, but, without the help of the nonverbal vocabulary of feeling, the knowledge would not be expressed in the manner we encounter in humans and is probably present in so many living species. Feeling is, in effect, the barrier, because the realization of human consciousness may require the existence of feelings. The "looks" of emotion can be simulated, but what feelings feel like cannot be duplicated in silicon. Feelings cannot be duplicated unless flesh is duplicated, unless the brain's actions on flesh are duplicated, unless the brain's sensing of flesh after it has been acted upon by the brain is duplicated.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Our conscious experience normally includes a brief memory of what we sense as "the just before," which is attached to what we innocently think is the "now." That memory describes the sense of a self to whom some knowledge is being attributed.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“We are obviously not awake during dream sleep and yet we have some consciousness of the events taking place in the mind. The memory we form of the last dream fragments before we wake up indicates that some consciousness was "on.”
― António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness