I’ve read a couple more of your posts on consciousness, and I think I see where you’re coming from. He uses the analogy of a symphony. A lot of computationists think that brain processing happens in a language of its own, sometimes called “mentalese.” But I personally see it as very unlikely. consciously aware of feelings associated with changes occurring to its Does Damasio address the issue of how qualia come about? And here we get to what I find to be the most interesting aspects of Damasio’s theory. This  happens with greater resolution in the neocortex than in the sub-cortical areas, but it happens in many areas of the brain, all in the regions closest to where the sensory pathways come in. This emergent process occurs when an organism becomes It’s an explanation for how perception, memory, imagination, and decisions get made in the brain. ‘Feeling’ emerges as a still unconscious state which simply senses the Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future? There’s obviously a lot here, and I’ve just given a very surface level summary. My favorite philosopher of mind is David Chalmers, who makes a distinction between the hard problem and the easy problem of consciousness: the easy problem being “how does the mind work”, and the hard problem being “why is a mind conscious”. Do you think it will ever be possible to solve the hard problem with science? He describes his theory in an informal manner, and supports it by evidence from neurological practice. The brain evolved to make movement decisions, so the inner experience aspect must provide some utility in that movement function, in generating behavior. The CDRegions interlink with each other, but the linking appears to converge heavily in a region Damasio calls the PMCs (posteromedial cortices), an unusual name referring to a region that, judging by his diagrams, appear to be in the middle portions of the parietal lobe, and the posterior cingulate cortex underneath. When It maintains its active model of the body, the chief object of its concern, and has the basic foundations of homeostasis management. Please go on to read if you're interested. I agree on the language / symbolism preoccupation. More specifically, I think it will explain why we have the intuition, the feeling of the hard problem. I think that it is clear that the human brain is nothing more than an information-processing device (however unfamiliar its methods may be), and that the reason I think thoughts and feel feelings is because of my physical, material brain. To understand the image making areas, consider the process of seeing something. One possible flaw I see in this overall framework is that it’s more a theory of self than of consciousness in particular. I believe the human brain is too complicated for the human mind to grasp. When I first read Damasio’s description of this core self concept, I wondered what he was talking about? Further from the sensory pathway areas are the dispositional portions. Why, A Medley of Potpourri is just what it says; various thoughts, opinions, ruminations, and contemplations on a variety of subjects. I suppose that the version of the hard problem that confounds me the most is: can we ever know if anyone/thing else isn’t a philosophical zombie? This level could not exist Damasio envisions CDZs existing in the “many thousands”, but there being a few dozen CDRegions. It’s worth watching some Demasio videos – on one he actually says he things homeostasis is not a helpful word coz it implies static which the system is anything but. Biology always seems to be an improvisation, although it’s improvisation honed by natural selection across millions of generations. Emotion acts as a neural object, from which a physical reaction can be Our intuitions about its purity are wrong, so worrying about whatever problems arise from that is not productive. The idea is that homeostasis is reactive while allostasis is predictive. This is known as core consciousness. It is heavily dependent on memories, along with the projections it makes for the future. In Damasio’s view, consciousness centers on the self. I agree that studying the mechanisms of the brain is much more interesting and fruitful than pondering the hard problem, but I still think that the problem exists. ( Log Out /  Necessary condition: there is a ‘counting’ device (counting strews, abacus or Turing computer). Then I realized that he was addressing primal first person experience, the state of a self experiencing perceptions and what those perceptions immediately mean to the self, to the body. CDRegions are probably created from genetic information, as are many primordial CDZs, but most CDZs get created from experience, from learning. Homeostasis and balanced equilibrium. experiences or project itself into the future. conventional memory. The brain is vitally concerned with and tightly bound to the body. In Damasio (1999) the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts forward his theory of consciousness. Something else? The evolution of the brain is beautiful proof. I know that even my own fascination with the hard problem itself comes from the deterministic and unconscious atoms that bounce around my skull, but I’m still not sure if I can ever be certain that I’m not the only person who’s really alive. If you have the time, here’s Damasio’s TED talk on consciousness: I have read some of Damasio’s books. In particular, a simulation model is described of the dynamics of basic mechanisms leading via emotion and feeling to core consciousness, and dynamic properties are formally specified that hold for these … It is constantly receiving updates of its body image map from every corner of the body proper, initiating various changes, and then receiving the results of those changes in a tight resonance loop with the body that never ends, until death. That’s where the color white comes in. Antonio Damasio’s theories of consciousness and the self are complicated and can get bewildering on a first reading. Wouldn’t you say it is true that every aspect of life is rooted in physics and chemistry that life bootstrapped upon? Damasio's approach to explaining the development of consciousness relies on three notions: emotion, feeling, and feeling a feeling. Relating consciousness to fundamental physics seems similar to Penrose’s approach, although Penrose is looking for a new physics. It seems we constantly and usually experience near-equilibrium states. White doesn’t exist in nature (of course, neither does any other color, but white doesn’t exist even as a particular range of wavelengths like the other colors do). of qualia. This is partly because he builds the theory through the explanation of relationships among a pretty large number of parts. Damasio's Theory of Consciousness Proto-Self The most basic representation of self(awareness shared by all life forms) Pre-conscious state-concerned only with homeostasis Direct report of body's response to environment Provides reference for 'Core Consciousness' and Extended I think that Damasio’s theory is one of the most interesting ideas about solving the easy problem, but I’m not sure if it really gets at the hard one, because all that he establishes is that the brain may be capable of recalling memory in the form of feelings when presented with some stimulus (e.g. Humans can be awake and attentive without being conscious. . It is a physical phenomenon rooted in physics and chemistry and is something that life bootstrapped upon. The most basic representation of the organism is referred to as the Protoself, next is Core Consciousness, and finally, Extended Consciousness. This occurs when the patterns contributing to It’s almost certainly more of a spectrum, with early sensory cortices perhaps being more image forming and other regions gradually becoming more dispositional the further they are from the sensory pathways. The higher portions construct an image of the musculoskeletal body. But his work has no connection to the ‘FUNDAMENTAL’ laws, the laws of nature (physics). It develops a momentary sense of self, as the brain continuously builds Does that come up in the book, Mike? Two, definition of ‘consciousness’: ), there is a lot of overlap between the books, although it sounds like he ponders qualia more directly in the older one. Emotions are a collection of unconscious neural responses to qualia. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. 2) Consciousness is more than wakefulness or attentiveness. But it is hard to explain pathophysiology in terms of the thermostat model. The brainstem is constantly receiving updates from the body, from the peripheral nervous system. Later, when only one of these signals come in, it may trigger a reverse signal flow, initiating a process called retroactivation, that causes a version of the patterns that initially formed the convergence to reappear in the image areas. The second step for us is that we feel the emotion though the body image, which influences our inclinations, but leaves us with the power to alter the inclined actions, a capability the autobiographical self contributes toward and a possibly adaptive reason for its existence. It does not require language or memory, nor can it reflect on past When the signals reach the vision processing centers, patterns form, models, image maps built from the cumulative signals coming in. finally, Extended Consciousness. level of self is shared by many species. 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