Feeling & Knowing by Antonio Damasio

Author:Antonio Damasio [Damasio, Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

NATURAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Unannounced and unaccompanied by a proper definition, the word “consciousness” has acquired multiple meanings and become a bit of a linguistic nightmare. This young English word did not even exist in the time of Shakespeare and has no direct counterpart in Romance languages; in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, one has to make do with the equivalent of “conscience” and use context to clarify which meaning of “conscience” the speaker is after.1

Some of the varied meanings of consciousness relate to the optics of the observer/user. Philosophers, psychologists, biologists, or sociologists look at consciousness distinctly. So do ordinary people who hear, night and day, that certain problems are or fail to be “in their consciousness” and who must wonder if consciousness is the erudite label for being awake or attentive or simply having a mind. Yet quietly, hiding under its cultural baggage, there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what is a mental experience? It is a state of mind imbued with two striking and related features: the mental contents it displays are felt, and those mental contents adopt one singular perspective. Further analysis reveals that the singular perspective is that of the particular organism within which the mind inheres. Readers who detect a kinship between the notions of “organism perspective,” “self,” and “subject” will not be wrong. Nor will they be wrong when they realize that “self,” “subject,” and “organism perspective” correspond to something quite tangible: the reality of “ownership.” The “organism owns its particular mind”; the mind belongs to its particular organism. We—me, you, whoever is the conscious entity—own an organism animated by a conscious mind.

To make these considerations as transparent as possible, we need to be clear about the meaning of a few terms: mind, perspective, and feeling. Mind, as defined earlier, is one way of referring to the active production and display of images arising from actual perception or from memory recall or from both. The images that constitute a mind flow in a never-ending cortege and, as they do so, describe all sorts of actors and objects, all sorts of actions and relationships, all sorts of qualities without and with symbolic translations. Images, of every kind—visual, auditory, tactile, verbal, and so forth—individually or in combination, are natural vehicles of knowledge, they transport knowledge, they explicitly signify knowledge.

Perspective refers to “point of view,” provided there is no doubt that when I use the word view I do not mean vision only. The consciousness of blind people also has a perspective, but it has nothing to do with seeing. By point of view I mean something more general: the relation I hold not just to what I see but also to what I hear or touch and, importantly, even to what I perceive in my own body.

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