Antonio Damasio - Feeling and Consciousness

[Music] [Applause] feeling and consciousness living inside now it's speech about funding and the very interesting proposals from the Templeton obviously I'm not going to tell you that I know exactly the answers for consciousness because I want to get funding from Darwin's to know more about consciousness but nonetheless I'm going to talk about feeling and consciousness two words that are not usually spoken together and what I would like to do is tell you that they should be spoken together and in fact there is no way of talking about feeling without talking about consciousness because but how would we know that we have feelings if we were not conscious and this this other side is more complicated there's no way of talking about consciousness in my view if you don't have feeling also and that's really an inseparable 'ti there so let's start with what is feeling feelings that you will all recognize well being malaise hunger thirst desire pleasure fatigue the sense of energy or the sense of flourishing these are all examples of the most fundamental kind of feelings then in fact then not to be thought about as feelings you know you talk about them but you don't refer to them as feelings but they are and they are what I call homeostatic feelings because what they translate mentally is the state of life within a living organism the in fact translate the state of play of homeostasis an armistice is a word I'm sure that most of you know but for those who might not it really is that set of principles that allows life processes to continue in such a way that life continues and that does not derive into disease or death so this fact that the fundamental aspects of feelings are related to the mental expression of the state of our life and the governance of our life is absolutely critical and people tend not to think of that one of the ways is that very often feelings are very closely directed to feelings for example of emotions which is a whole different level of organization of affect those tend to dominate the conversation about affecting and feeling but these fundamental ones are more critical for reasons that we'll get into in in no time so feelings are conscious of necessity try to think about what it would be like to have a feeling that would not be conscious and I'm sure that you cannot come up with next the important point feelings are not trivial matters in fact there's no one here in this room and if we have already had interesting hints of that in some of the prior talks no one here would have pain and not want to treat it except on circumstances that would be highly pathological and there was a reference a very interesting one to anorexia nervosa where things of that sort can happen but they are pathologic so when we have pain we want to reduce it we want to get rid of it and when we want when we have pleasure we want to hold on to it and a lot of our lives are governed by feelings that are telling is precisely what we should or should not do very good example the hunger or thirst that you feel at any moment next feelings are most of the time ignored in the conversation on cognition most of the time that one talks about brain and mind or about mind in general which is of course the theme of this meeting feelings are bypassed as if they were not central as if they were peripheral as if there were something accessory in our minds we spend a tremendous amount of time and justifiably so talking about perception about the way we reason about the way we construct memories about the way we retrieve them about the way we generate narratives and translate them verbally or not about the way we make decisions and even about consciousness and yet you bypass feelings very easily it's really not central to the conversation so let me my point here is to tell you about the consequences of this bypass first consequence it allows us to ignore the centrality of non neurobiological processes in the construction of our minds it's interesting just think about how common it is for us to refer to minds as coming from brains as Minds as the result of brain function how many of us tend to think of Minds is coming in very good part out of non neural biological processes another consequence of the bypass it blocks from view the history of living beings now living beings have existed on the face of the earth for at least four billion years we have had single-cell organisms there have been in existence with characteristics of their function and organization without a nervous system with many of them without without even a nucleus and they have in spite of all of that being there without nervous systems and organized and produced incredible feats of behavior control and incredible feats even of sociality now just think of the fact that we have had nervous systems on the face of the earth for something like 500 million years compare that to 4 billion years of life on earth and brains like ours a couple of hundred million years and it's not really like ours to be clear so the the obscuring this view of life on Earth is one of the things that happens because of the fact that we bypass feeling because feeling puts us directly in line and Enki with living processes the bypass of feeling also helps perpetuate the myth the myth that minds are constructed from the brain alone and by the brain alone and yet a much more plausible scenario is that minds are constructed from a cooperation of non neural and neural events that exist very intensely and that of course neuroscience and biology in general are reviewing all the time and finally the bypass also blocks our view of the critical connection of feeling and consciousness now in order to say something about that I need to tell you what my view of consciousness is and again we're going to forget about Darwin particular on this matter what do I mean ridiculous to try to explain what one thinks of consciousness inside of a 10-minute talk and yet there are two parts to a very quick definition that I'm gonna give you it's the process by which ongoing mental processes the process that I mentioned to a while ago for example perception but making it memories reasoning the construction of narratives the making of decisions all of cognition effects are referred to the owner of those processes and the owner of those processes for lack of a better word is a self now the self is a tremendously complicated concept and I don't want you to waste too much time with that because it has many levels and in many times people get very confused and worked up about the word itself but it's that referral of our cognition to this central critical entity called the self that is one of the key aspects of the definition of consciousness and the other part has to do with the value of that so when you define consciousness even very simply and currently I want to make sure that I tell you not only what it tends to be but also what it is for because there's still many people that think that consciousness is useless and there is you know something with without which we might not live not you know not miss and that's obviously nonsense and the fact is that that referral is part of the assistance that the process gives us to maintain life and I just gave you actually when I was talking about feeling some of the examples if you were not conscious of the fact that you are hungry which happens to be determined by the biochemistry of the moment you would not be able to go and eat because you would not have this very very complex phenomenon that not only allows you to perceive something that is going on in your organism but also forces you in Pels you to a certain behavior that's part of the complexity of feeling so feelings and being conscious are not useless things they're things that are actually critical for the governance of our life which really means that they are in the line of homeostasis they are in the line of main raining life in a way that can be continued for as long as our genome will allow it to be continued within the circumstances in which we live and the now we go to the final point and then I'm going to shut up and that is how is this done and how this feeling intervene in the process of consciousness because the two things really come at the same time and here I would say the following feeling is critical for this bizarre and that's the word I will use scientifically for this bizarre perception that we have of what is going on in our own organism and that allow us to create something that for lack of a better word I will call being and it is very bizarre because when we talk about perception and when we talk about it respecting what the word usually means we realize that it has a subject and an object well the beauty of what of the beauty and the strangeness of what happens with with with feeling and consciousness is that we actually have at the same time in complete collusion you have an object and a subject and it is out of this let's call it confusion if you want of this confusion of subject and object because the object of the perception that gives us feeling and consciousness is our body but at the same time we are in that body as subjects it is out of this that you generate this situation of being and this really calls attention to the fact that this is primordial it's really a beginning and I'm not very fond of establishing rigid arrangements of processes but nonetheless I think this is a foundational process for those of you that have read some of what I've written about consciousness you will know that there are other things that intervene many interesting processes that go on in the brain such as for example creating a reference of our our body in the form of a structure map that allows the processes then to be localized at the cognitive level that's all very interesting and important but nonetheless that's not the key that's not the beginning the beginning is this at this beginning by the way something that I expect to be highly available in nature and it's not going to be available for creatures that do not have nervous systems but it's going to be available for any creature that has a complex enough nervous system which really means they're social insects habit and that bacteria probably don't one reason being the lack of metrics lack of mapping capabilities for creatures like bacteria that do not have a nervous system and they do not have the capacity for neural representations and the very final comment that I'm going to make and this actually connects very well with Alison Gopnik prior talk is the following we have just published in nature machine intelligence a paper that's with myself and one of my colleagues Kings and men we have just published a paper or start of these homeostasis soft robotics and the making of feeling machines and the point of that paper is actually very similar to the point that Allison was making she was making a beautiful point that artificial intelligence like everybody in this room knows is both wonderful and as serious limitations and that if we're going to have an artificial intelligence that is truly intelligent in the way that we are intelligent we have to have certain cognitive aspects in certain aspects of the structure that turned out to be turn out to go in the direction of vulnerability and weakness as opposed to perfection so Allison was pointing to our three-year-olds way even before that you will have this immense disorganization this this aspect of behavior that you would say well what a pity is not really concentrating the way it should well it's marvelous and it's not concentrating the way it shouldn't it's not restricting possibilities because what it is doing instead is something marvelous which is this huge ability to connect things that an adult will not connect because an adult is going to be rigid in terms of the nervous system is supposed to the to the young child now one of the in parallel to this there is this enormous vulnerability and weakness that is introduced by our own feelings imagine that we didn't have them we would be you know we would be rigid structures and contrary to what one might think it is the this weakness and this vulnerability that is in fact going to have a huge payoff in permitting through flexibility a variety of arrangements that can be truly intelligent and that mostly connect with that fundamental intelligence that I refer to that comes out of the combination of feeling and the inevitable consciousness there occurs along with feeling so it's something that you may want to take a look at to read the paper and tell me what you think thank you very much for your attention [Applause] [Music]

Channel: BrainMind Summit

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Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020