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)
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)