Article  Interview with Antonio Damasio: Can consciousness exist without a body?

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article...out_a_body

INTRO: For centuries, defining and understanding consciousness has eluded neuroscientists, philosophers, and doctors. Is consciousness what it means to be alive? Is it knowing who we are, as individual people? How do we know if any being has consciousness or not? Now, with the dawn of generative artificial intelligence, what it means to be a conscious being ranks high among the most complex—and urgent—questions of our age.

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, consciousness has simple origins: It lies in the feelings produced in our bodies. Damasio, a researcher at the University of Southern California, has spent his career—spanning nearly half a century—investigating our feelings, emotions, and sense of self. In his new book, Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness, Damasio lays out a framework for consciousness rooted in our physical selves.

“Consciousness is not about things in your mind alone; it is not created by your brain alone,” he explains. “It’s actually created by this beautiful partnership between brain and body.”

I spoke to Damasio about the science of consciousness, how it works in the body, and how its aim is to keep us alive. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity... (MORE - details)

If we agreed that consciousness is the ability to visualize hypothetical scenarios .. visualize actions taken within those scenarios and the possible new scenarios created by those actions .. then having a body is largely irrelevant. In the past it could take thousands of years for folks to change from one sort of porridge bowl to a slightly different one which suggests people weren't really thinking much - at least not about porridge bowls. Possibly 'thinking' was seen as a form of insanity .. any voices in the head as something to be scared of. When Moses told his folks they were going to flee across the desert maybe his folks didn't even wonder whether or not it was a good idea .. they just did it. It made sense to the people when Moses said God told him to do it .. how else could he have come up with a plan .. any plan. What Jesus suggested (?) wasn't just culture .. it was an invention .. the start of 'thinking outside the box' .. something that swept through the West (for the first time?). Do millions of dead bodies have any meaning or consequence .. I'd say not .. but their ideas do.

"The fundamental premise of materialism is that there’s this thing called matter, and that only it is real, and that any kind of subjective form of awareness or consciousness, therefore, must be a product of that material base. But what’s so extraordinary is this. If you talk to neuroscientists today, they’re the first people to say something like: ‘We don’t have a clue how you get from warm brain matter to this 3D movie that you and I are in right now. We don’t even have a beginning. We can’t even imagine that in principle.” It’s not like, “We have a model, and we just need to tinker with it for a few more decades.” It’s more like, “No, we don’t even have a beginning to that.”----Jeffery Kripal

We cannot deny the inherent non-locality of consciousness or the mind. Saying it happens in this tiny part of our brains or another is to mistake it for some objective thing-in-itself. But from whence is this discreteness--this locatibility--of the mind? Of this ubiquitous dimension of phenomenal being including math and language and concepts and awareness and imagination and all the minds we ever encounter in our lives? It continuously defies such convenient objectifications. Even as we are conceiving it as such and such a self-identical thing going on here or there we are yet assuming its very unmediated presence to that thing, conceiving it and thinking it as such. The mind pervades and underlies us and the reality we find ourselves thrown into. It is everywhere and yet nowhere at once, making possible any "whereness" at all.

(Sep 18, 2026 06:40 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "The fundamental premise of materialism is that there’s this thing called matter, and that only it is real, and that any kind of subjective form of awareness or consciousness, therefore, must be a product of that material base. But what’s so extraordinary is this. If you talk to neuroscientists today, they’re the first people to say something like: ‘We don’t have a clue how you get from warm brain matter to this 3D movie that you and I are in right now. We don’t even have a beginning. We can’t even imagine that in principle.” It’s not like, “We have a model, and we just need to tinker with it for a few more decades.” It’s more like, “No, we don’t even have a beginning to that.”----Jeffery Kripal

Well, Kripal is not in neuroscience (he's a religious scholar with an Idealist metaphysics), so he would not necessarily be up on the latest scientific models of consciousness, nor open to them if he were.  This would seem like the standard argument against science: "well, science hasn't fully explained this yet, therefore [mystical belief]."

"Consciousness is not physical in nature and cannot be understood or measured in the way physical things can be. Nor is it clear how consciousness could ever arise from physical things, or interact with them. If you work with the assumption that the substances, processes, and events of the world are ultimately physical, it appears to be impossible to adequately explain the most self-evident feature of life, namely, our experience, which is embarrassing, or at least ought to be....

The inquiry that matters is not so much “what is consciousness?” because the answer is unlikely to be a simple what, but more like a complex how, an abiding why, a flowing when, and even a pervading who. It’s probably not a where, however, and that matters too. Consciousness may interact with your brain and body, but it is looking increasingly unlikely that it’s made from them. You might say consciousness comes from elsewhere, but more likely it didn’t come from anywhere at all, and didn’t have to. Perhaps experience is like Tom Bombadil, and just is, and always was. And if, as appears to be the case, consciousness exists in time, but not in space, our challenge as humans is not to locate consciousness, but to make time a better place to be."---- Jonathan Rowson https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/make...reat-again