Book review: “Feeling and knowing. Making minds conscious” by Antonio Damasio.

Antonio Damasio is known for his research on consciousness from a neurological and evolutionary perspective. His latest book, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, starts by focusing on the development, around 3.8 billion years ago, of living organisms with homeostatic processes that involve a “non-explicit” form of intelligence in the service of self-preservation. Here we find sensing, but still no feelings nor mental processes; yet these early forms of sensing are seen as a necessary basis for the development of feelings and consciousness. With the development of organisms with nervous systems, starting around 500 million years ago, feelings and “minding” (in the form of images of the surrounding environment) enter the scene. Feelings are seen to have their origin in the nerve cells’ close interaction with the biochemical processes that occur in the homeostatic regulation of the body. In this interaction between nervous systems and the bodily interior, feelings emerge as subjective experiences of homeostatic bodily processes. Consciousness is described by Damasio as involving an experience of ownership of one’s body, feelings, perspectives, etc. Because consciousness represents a further developmental stage on top of feelings, it cannot be based solely on the nervous system. Although Damasio sees the nervous system as a critical contributor to the development of minds and consciousness, he emphasizes that any theory that relies exclusively on the nervous system to account for minds and consciousness is likely to fail. Damasio’s book contains many innovative parts, that may stimulate new thinking and new research on these matters. It also illustrates how discussions about the nature of sentience, feeling and consciousness all too often suffer from an insufficient differentiation between distinct kinds of phenomena, and the need for an improved conceptual apparatus for a more nuanced description of the phenomena involved.