Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Damasio: idea that consciousness might be generated by nervous system alone is false

#1
C C Offline
https://www.the-scientist.com/reading-fr...ness-69306

EXCERPTS (Antonio Damasio): All the available science suggests that the nervous system is an indispensable contributor to the making of minds and consciousness. But the nervous system alone is not sufficient to explain minds and consciousness. Attempts to understand consciousness exclusively in terms of neural activity have failed [...] It is likely true that consciousness only emerges in organisms endowed with nervous systems, but it is just as true that consciousness also requires abundant interactions between those systems and many non-nervous parts of the organism

[...] how and when did this marriage of body and brain happen in the history of life, and what are its ultimate consequences? I explore this and other questions that involve consciousness in my new book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. [...Read an excerpt from it...]

[...] The arrival of nervous systems, starting about 500 million years ago, changed the landscape of life radically. [...] Feelings were among the first examples of mind phenomena, otherwise known as mental representations. Eventually, feelings allowed creatures to represent the basic state of their own bodies as they engaged in regulating internal functions: feeding and drinking, for example, and social behaviors such as cooperation and conflict. Feelings provided organisms with experiences of their own life, assessments of their relative success at living, a natural examination grade that comes in the form of a quality—pleasant or unpleasant, light or intense. And organisms evolved to behave according to how they felt, which is the profound novelty of consciousness.

Once being and feeling were in place, they supported and extended the sapience that makes up the third member of the trio: knowing. This is the process of acquiring and accumulating knowledge, constructed from information gathered by vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, with the help of memory and reasoning...

In the context of evolution, after organisms began to commit experiences to memory, they became capable of maintaining an exhaustive history of their lives—a history of their interactions with others and of their interactions with the environment. This was a necessary but not sufficient step on the path to personhood... (MORE - missing details)
Reply
#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:The arrival of nervous systems, starting about 500 million years ago, changed the landscape of life radically. [...] Feelings were among the first examples of mind phenomena, otherwise known as mental representations. Eventually, feelings allowed creatures to represent the basic state of their own bodies as they engaged in regulating internal functions: feeding and drinking, for example, and social behaviors such as cooperation and conflict. Feelings provided organisms with experiences of their own life, assessments of their relative success at living, a natural examination grade that comes in the form of a quality—pleasant or unpleasant, light or intense. And organisms evolved to behave according to how they felt, which is the profound novelty of consciousness.

Facinating to ponder the piecemeal evolution of the mind from the inside so to speak. From the raw states of sensations like pain, hunger, tiredness, satiation, and surprise to the more complex and nuanced feelings of love, play, pleasure, territorialism, fear, empowerment, etc. To come to know those feelings so well as representations of our bodily states and acting upon them accordingly. And finally to experience the whole of the mind as ourselves living our lives.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Brains might sync as people interact — and that could upend consciousness research C C 0 65 Jul 27, 2021 01:19 AM
Last Post: C C
  New perspectives challenge the idea that saturated fats cause heart disease C C 0 97 Jan 25, 2021 07:25 AM
Last Post: C C
  Is classical atomistic theory the most important idea in human history? C C 0 178 May 3, 2020 09:07 PM
Last Post: C C
  Ethics alone won’t fix Big Tech’s problems C C 0 325 Apr 18, 2019 02:45 PM
Last Post: C C
  Future fruit of the "organisms are algorithms" idea C C 0 335 Jan 28, 2019 05:29 AM
Last Post: C C
  New Power Plant idea uses Fusion trevorjohnson 9 1,220 Aug 12, 2017 07:11 PM
Last Post: trevorjohnson
  Cosmogenesis: The idea of creating a new universe in the lab is no joke C C 1 323 Jun 25, 2017 08:30 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  The inheritance of crime: An old, discredited idea makes a comeback C C 0 375 Jul 11, 2016 07:51 PM
Last Post: C C
  Multiverse can't explain reality: The idea that is even stranger C C 3 1,200 Feb 13, 2016 05:43 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)