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

“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