Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Antonio R. Damasio
Language: English
Pages: 282
ISBN: 0099498022
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From one of the most significant neuroscientists at work today, a pathbreaking investigation of a question that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists for centuries: how is consciousness created?
Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the origins and varieties of feelings, which is central to his framework for the biological construction of consciousness: feelings are grounded in a near fusion of body and brain networks, and first emerge from the historically old and humble brain stem rather than from the modern cerebral cortex.
Damasio suggests that the brain’s development of a human self becomes a challenge to nature’s indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution and the source of a new level of life regulation—sociocultural homeostasis. He leaves no doubt that the blueprint for the work-in-progress he calls sociocultural homeostasis is the genetically well-established basic homeostasis, the curator of value that has been present in simple life-forms for billions of years. Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.
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cortex. 12 Qualia and Self How do Qualia I and Qualia II fit in the process of self? Since both aspects of qualia round up the construction of the mind, qualia is part of the contents that come to be known as the self process, the self construction illuminating the mind construction. But somewhat paradoxically, Qualia II is also the grounding for the protoself and thus sits astride mind and self, in a hybrid transition. The neural design that enables qualia provides the brain with felt
become conscious and those that remain unconscious. The image space is located in the map-making brain, the large territory formed by the aggregate of all the early sensory cortices, the regions of cerebral cortex located in and around the entry point of visual, auditory, and other sensory signals into the brain. It also includes the territories of the nucleus tractus solitarius, parabrachial nucleus, and superior colliculi, which have image-making capability. The dispositional space is that in
worse. This is the kind of consciousness illustrated by novels, films, and music and celebrated by philosophical reflection. I have given names to those two kinds of consciousness. The minimal-scope kind I call core consciousness, the sense of the here and now, unencumbered by much past and by little or no future. It revolves around a core self and is about personhood but not necessarily identity. The big-scope kind I call extended or autobiographical consciousness, given that it manifests itself
present inside our organisms and all the imaginable things and events out in the world or in the rest of the body. This difference is indispensable to understanding the biological foundation of the self processes. This same contrast between variety and sameness also holds at the level of the sensory portals. The changes that the sensory portals undergo from their basal state to the state associated with looking and seeing do not have to be extensive, although they can be. The changes simply have
a single screen to display the images. The chips (the images) fall where they must (the imagemaking regions) and enter the mind stream as they do, in their appropriate time and order. For the construction of the self state to be complete, however, the modified protoself must be connected with the images of the causative object. How might that happen? And how does the ensemble of these disparate sets of images get to be organized so that it constitutes a coherent scene and thus a fully fledged
