Episode 789: Antonio Damasio: Why We Feel, What Makes Us Conscious, and What AI Lacks

us.

A novel title.

Yeah.

Normally, I ask for my last question is, what do you want readers to take away from this book? And that AI part of it is an important thing.

But what would you like your readers? Because I took so much away.

And the way I look at a book at the end, if it's a good book, is because once I close the covers of this book, I'm reading.

I'm not done with the book.

Look at us talking here.

The book is like all of our books that we were talking about earlier.

This is a friend now.

And recall the book.

I recall the tree that you talked about.

I recall all the different subjects we've talked about.

So So what is it that you would like a reader like me to take away from it, including the idea, hey, I'm not done.

I need to go on a quest for more information.

I think the main idea is the fact that consciousness has been considered either an unsolvable problem or has had lots of solutions that are incompatible with each other, and that clearly don't work.

I want people to think that consciousness is a problem.

Indeed, it's a biological problem and that we can solve that problem and that we have an approach to

that

problem.

And that approach is by relating consciousness to life and by making consciousness be an important component in the development and maintenance of complex life like the life we have.

The idea that consciousness is important is not a nightmare only.

The nightmare can be solved and we have the means to do it provided we want to to think, we do the job of collecting the information through science.

That's critical.

We are living creatures, we have these properties, and we have the machinery and all the tools of biology and of neurobiology that can allow us to collect the data and then judge hypotheses and decide whether the hypotheses are correct or not.