Feeling & Knowing Quotes

“If we were to remove the conscious component from our ongoing mental states, you and I would still have images flowing in our minds, but those images would be unconnected to us as singular individuals. The images would not be owned by you or me or anyone else. They would flow unmoored. No one would know to whom such images belonged. Sisyphus would be fine. He is a tragic figure only because he knows that the abominable predicament is his.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.
By now we should be clear about the origin of feelings. Feelings arise in the interior of organisms, in the depth of viscera and fluids where the chemistry responsible for life in all its aspects reigns supreme. I am talking about the operations of the endocrine and immune and circulatory systems, in charge of metabolism and defense.”
― António R. Damásio, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The state and quality of the actual objects and actions of the interior are the stars. It is not the actual violins or trumpets that steal the show; it is the sounds they make.”
― António Damásio, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“To be sure, nonhumans have succeeded in evading or mitigating causes of pain and suffering but, for example, have not been able to modify their origins. The consequences of consciousness for humans have been remarkably larger in scope and reach. Note that this is not because the core mechanisms of consciousness are different in humans—I believe they are not—but because the intellectual resources of humans are so much taller and wider. Those larger resources have enabled humans to respond to the polar experiences of suffering or of pleasure by inventing new objects, actions, and ideas, which have translated into the creation of cultures.1”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Sometimes popular wisdom beats laborious science. That feelings are not purely mental; that they are hybrids of mind and body; that they move with ease from mind to body and back again; and that they disturb the mental peace, those are the points of the song and my points in this chapter. All I need to add is that the power of feelings comes from the fact that they are present in the conscious mind: technically speaking, we feel because the mind is conscious, and we are conscious because there are feelings! I am not playing with words; I am merely stating the seemingly paradoxical but very real facts. Feelings were and are the beginning of an adventure called consciousness.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Consciousness, then, is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution. The operations of the body’s interior signaled via the interoceptive nervous system contribute the feeling component, while other operations within the central nervous system contribute imagery describing the world around the organism as well as its musculoskeletal frame. These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“In case we get distracted by the saga of the significance of feelings, we also need to recall that all feelings are devoted to mirroring the state of life within a body, whether that state is spontaneous or has been modified by an emotion. This applies fully to all feelings that participate in the process of generating consciousness. In conclusion, the feelings that are continuously displayed in a mind and are so integral to the making of consciousness have two sources. One source is the never-ending business of running life within the body, which inevitably reflects its ups and downs—well-being, malaise, hunger for food and air, thirst, pain, desire, pleasure. As we saw earlier, these are examples of “homeostatic feelings.” The other source of feelings is the collection of emotive reactions, weak or strong, that mental contents frequently prompt—the fears, joys, and irritations that visit us any day. Their mental expressions are known as “emotional feelings,” and they are part of the multimedia production that constitutes internal narratives.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“We need to assert that self-reference is not an optional feature of feeling but a defining, indispensable one. And we can venture further: we can declare feeling a foundational component of standard consciousness.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Curiously relative to the world inside our organisms, perspective is provided by feelings that unequivocally reveal the natural link between mind and body. Feelings let the mind know, automatically, without any questions being asked, that mind and body are together, each belonging to the other. The classic void that has separated physical bodies from mental phenomena is naturally bridged thanks to feelings.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Relative to the world around us, the standard perspective of most living organisms is largely defined from the head of those organisms. In part this is due to the placement of sensory probes—of sight, sound, smell, taste, and even balance—at the top (or front end) of the body.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Death as a source of tragedy was well established in biblical narratives and in Greek theater, and has remained present in artistic endeavors. W. H. Auden captures the idea in a poem in which he turns humans into exhausted but rebellious gladiators pleading with a cruel emperor and says, “We who must die demand a miracle.” He wrote demand and not require or request, a sure sign of a poet at the end of his rope, watching in desperation the inescapable crumbling of the individual human. Auden had realized that “nothing can save us that is possible,” a not-so-original conclusion that has worked itself into the founding story of many religions and philosophical systems and that still leads mortals everywhere to follow the advice of the churches that assist them in their vales of tears.2 And yet pain alone, singular pain without the prospect of pleasure would have promoted the avoidance of suffering but not the seeking of well-being. Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The consequences of consciousness for humans have been remarkably larger in scope and reach. Note that this is not because the core mechanisms of consciousness are different in humans—I believe they are not—but because the intellectual resources of humans are so much taller and wider. Those larger resources have enabled humans to respond to the polar experiences of suffering or of pleasure by inventing new objects, actions, and ideas, which have translated into the creation of cultures.1”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“We are quite familiar with the direct way in which illness gives way to discomfort and pain or exuberant health produces pleasure. But we often overlook the fact that psychological and sociocultural situations also gain access to the machinery of homeostasis in such a way that they too result in pain or pleasure, malaise or well-being. In its unerring push for economy, nature did not bother to create new devices to handle the goodness or badness of our personal psychology or social condition. It makes do with the same mechanisms. Playwrights and novelists and philosophers have long known this fact, but it remains unappreciated perhaps because the way things work tends to be even more nebulous when it comes to society and culture than when we deal with the rigors of the medical setting. Still, the pain of social shame is comparable to that of a raging cancer, betrayal can feel like a stab wound, and the pleasures that result from social admiration, for better and worse, can be truly orgasmic.1”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses. The controls are located in the diencephalon, a sector of the central nervous system located below the cerebral cortex and above the brain stem and spinal cord. The region in charge of this immune control is known as the hypothalamus, a famed orchestrator of the endocrine system that governs the secretion of most hormones throughout the body.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses. The controls are located in the diencephalon, a sector of the central nervous system located below the cerebral cortex and above the brain stem and spinal cord.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“In brief, nature has provided us with the fire alarms, the fire engines, and the medical facilities. A sign that nature has been perfecting this strategy is shown by the recent discovery of central nervous system controls of immune responses.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The trajectory behind the process of feeling is clear: a multitude of basic micro-messages travel from body tissues and organs either to (a) circulating blood and from there to the nervous system or, directly, to (b) nerve terminals embedded in body tissues and organs. Once the signals arrive in the central nervous system—in the spinal cord and the brain stem, for example—they face a number of possible roads that lead to varied neural centers where the feeling process can be advanced further. Ultimately, such complicated signal trajectories result in the production of informative mental images. The images, such as, for example, a dry mouth, a growling stomach, or the mere lack of energy signaled by weakness, operate as indicators of trouble. They are accompanied by worry and discomfort—an emotive state—which in turn motivate a response, in the form of a corrective action.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Arising as they do in the interior of our adjustable and dynamic organisms, feelings are both qualitative and quantitative. They exhibit valence—the quality rankings that make their warnings and advice be worth the effort and also motivate our actions as needed. When I experience homeostatic feelings—a situation that reflects an appraisal of my interior when certain physiological profiles prevail—I get to know, firsthand, about the state of my life, and the negative or positive valence of the experience advises me to correct the situation or else accept it and do little or nothing. It makes me spring into action or enjoy the ride.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Feelings collect information about the state of life within the organism, and the “qualities and intensities” that are manifested by feelings constitute valuations of the process of managing life. They are direct expressions of the degree of success or failure of the life enterprise within our body. Keeping alive is an uphill battle, and our bodies engage in a complicated and multicentric effort to make life not only possible but robustly so.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The consequences of these peculiarities are remarkable. Lack of myelin insulation and lack of blood-brain barrier allow signals from the body to interact with neural signals directly. In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The first peculiarity of interoception is a pervasive lack of myelin insulation in a majority of interoceptive neurons. Typical neurons have a cell body and an axon, the latter being the “cable” that leads to the synapse. In turn the synapse makes contact with the next neuron and either permits or withholds its activity. The result is the firing of the neuron or its silence. Myelin serves as an insulator of the axon cable, preventing extraneous chemical and bioelectrical contacts. In the absence of myelin, however, molecules in the surround of an axon interact with it and alter its firing potential. Moreover, other neurons can make synaptic contacts along the axon rather than at the neuron’s synapse, giving rise to what is known as non-synaptic signaling. These operations are neurally impure; they are not really separate from the body that hosts them.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“We must be careful when we use the notion of mapping in relation to our own body and to the making of feelings, as if the maps were a pure “reflection” or “picture” of the body structure and state, yet another example of a detached percept. Our feelings are not detached at all. In practice, there is little distance between feelings and the things felt. Feelings are commingled with the things and events we feel thanks to the exceptional and intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system. This intimacy, in turn, is itself a product of the peculiarities of the system charged with signaling from the body into the nervous system, that is, the interoceptive system.1”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Because the actual object of the feeling/perception is none other than a part of the organism itself, that object is in fact located within the subject/perceiver. Astonishing! Nothing comparable occurs with our external perceptions, for example, visual or auditory. The objects of visual or auditory perceptions do not communicate with our bodies. The landscape we see or the songs we hear are not in touch with our bodies, let alone inside them. They exist in a physically separate space.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The earliest physiological source of feelings is an integrated chemical profile of the organism’s interior. It is likely that such a molecular-level source was present in evolution prior to the appearance of nervous systems. But this is not to say that simple organisms devoid of nervous systems would have been (or are) capable of mental experiences, beginning with the experience of feelings. Feelings reflect a chemical regulatory process, the initial condition without which they could not occur, but another condition must be met, and that is a dialogue between body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons in a nervous system.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The operations of interior organs and systems are gradually represented in the nervous system, first in its peripheral nerve components, then in nuclei of the central nervous system (in the brain stem, for example), and later in the cerebral cortex. But there is an intense cooperation between body parts and neural elements. Body and nervous system remain interactive partners rather than separate “model” and “depiction.” What is ultimately imaged is neither purely neural nor purely bodily. It emerges from a dialogue, from a dynamic give-and-take between body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Figuratively, feelings do not take simple snapshots of external objects or events; feelings tape the whole show and the backstage activity, not just the surfaces, but also what is underneath.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“Feelings owe their existence to the fact that the nervous system has direct contact with our insides and vice versa. The nervous system literally “touches” the organism’s interior, everywhere in that interior, and it is “touched” in return. The nakedness of the interior relative to the nervous system and the direct access the nervous system enjoys relative to that interior are part of the uniqueness of interoception, the technical term reserved for the perception of our visceral interior. Interoception is distinct from the perception of our musculoskeletal system, known as proprioception, and from the perception of the outside world, or exteroception. We can obviously use words to describe the experiences of feeling, but we do not need the mediation of words in order to feel.2 Feelings, as enacted in our organism and experienced in our minds, exert a tug and a pull over us, literally disturb us, positively or negatively.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“People often speak of algorithms with reverence, with the respect appropriately owed to the sort of scientific or technical development that has changed lives. The reverence and the respect are well justified, but it is important to understand the nature of algorithms and be clear about their limits especially when we compare them to images. One should think of algorithms as recipes, as the way to prepare Wiener schnitzel or, as Michel Serres has suggested, tarte tatin.1 Recipes are helpful, of course, but they are not the thing that the recipes are meant to help you reach. You cannot taste a recipe of Wiener schnitzel or savor a recipe for tarte tatin. Thanks to your mind, you can anticipate the tastes and salivate accordingly, but given a recipe alone, you cannot really savor a nonexistent product. When people think of “uploading or downloading their minds” and becoming immortal, they should realize that their adventure—in the absence of live brains in live organisms—would consist in transferring recipes, and only recipes, to a computer device. Following the argument to its conclusion, they would not gain access to the actual tastes and smells of the real cooking and of the real food.”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

“The neural activity patterns that correspond to our surround are first concocted by sensory organs such as our eyes, our ears, or the tactile corpuscles in our skin. The sensory organs work with the central nervous system, where nuclei in regions such as the spinal cord and the brain stem assemble the signals collected by the sensory organs. Eventually, after a few more intermediate stations, the cerebral cortices receive and organize the perceptual signals. Thanks to the pioneering work of physiologists such as David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, we know that the result of this setup is the construction of maps of objects and of their territories, in varied sensory modalities, for example, sight, hearing, touch. The maps are the basis for the images we experience in our minds.1”
― António Damásio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious