The Core of Consciousness (Antonio Damasio, MD, PhD)

So thank you for joining me.

It's interesting.

I was thinking back.

I've been doing this for a long time, not as long as you have been studying consciousness and homeostatic feelings and the mind-body connection.

But I don't want to say that I've shied away from consciousness.

conversations about consciousness, I have just taken the hard problem of consciousness too literally, and I guess what I wanna start with is that when I read Natural Intelligence, and I have many of your books, I'm looking at the feeling of what happens right now, that you boil it down to something quite simple, right? That maybe seems obvious?

Well, it's not exactly obvious, but I think I've tried to, I like boil it down.

I think I boil it down to something understandable and something that connects with our lives without using strange language that most people will not use.

It's really about experience and this discovery process.

of our own existence and the discovery of a world that exists around us.

It's that simple.

And I think that most definitions of consciousness have been far more cumbersome and have been tied too much to the process itself, the possible biological process, and I did not want to do that.

I do have a very elaborate process to achieve consciousness, and I actually think I'm right, and I think we have the data to show it, we have the experiments, and just to be a little bit immodest, I think I've solved the problem.

Was it hard? Yes, it was hard.

But it's, you know, you have that experience because you're like me in the world of intellect.

It's very often things are there in front of us, but we don't see them because we're occupied with reality.

technicalities that have to do with our methods or have to do with the history of the problem, and those things impede the way.

But I think that actually beginning with the title of this book, I think there's a lot of clarity in my mind.

And I think it was very important to have in the title the notion of natural intelligence, for the very good reason that people cannot stop talking about the other kind, the artificial one, and to connect that natural intelligence to the rise of consciousness.

And what I'm trying to do is actually pointing out is that this does not start at the top.

It starts in a very humble way.

You know, one of my great influences in my career was Francis Crick.

and both my wife and I were very close to Francis and we loved him.

But he was sort of...

He was not diametrically opposed to our way of thinking, but almost, because he was a man very concerned with the biological detail, but also very concerned with the glories of existence and the fact that if we were conscious... of something, it had to be an incredibly complex and an incredibly high up process.