Best of Series: Inside Consciousness with Antonio DiMasio

He has earned many prestigious awards throughout his career. Currently, he serves as university professor, the David Dornzeif Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. His books Descartesera, Looking First, Minozza Self comes to Mind, the Strange Order of Things and Feeling and Knowing have been published in translation and

are taught in universities throughout the world. In this stimulating episode, I talked to Antonio Demasio about consciousness. People often think that the mind and consciousness are the same thing, but doctor Demasio disputes this notion. He argues that it's the complex relationship of both our brains and bodies that makes sentient thought possible. Homeostatic feelings like hunger and pain developed

before emotions, and along with it came consciousness. We also touch on the topics of perception, mental illness, evolution, panpsychism, AI and machine learning. So it's with great enthusiasm that I now bring you doctor Antonio Demasio. It's nice to finally meet you. We have some mutual friends in common. I I'm dear friends with Mary Helen and Maardino yang oh.

But the reason why I wanted to double click on that because I think that was a really seminal paper. I hope you agree of modern day brain network systems research on consciousness see that as a really seminal sort of early ideas. So could you kind of unpack a little bit what that paper showed.

So we have a number of portals into our brain that large we come out of the dominant perceptual systems, particularly of course the visual and the auditory, which clearly dominate in most individuals, and then all the other senses

that we know of. And what is interesting is that those the channeling of information from the sensory probes that are located in the periphery of our body and also the periphery of our nervous system and the central part of the nervous system, they all land in different parts of the brain, which is of course predictable, because we have a channel that goes, for example, from our eyes to a particular region of the cortex, which happens to be visual context, and then the place where the things

that you're hearing right now, that I'm hearing of my own voice, they land in another place. And then out of those hubs where information is being sent to you have the possibility of creating a sort of encircling where you have not only the immediate processing of what is

being channel at the moment. In this case, for example, I'm looking at your face and your bookcase behind you, you're listening to my voice and probably looking at whatever I have behind me, and so there's that early sensory processing. But then all around there are structures that can actually take a part the information that is coming in and provide storage for that information, sometimes in a piecemeal form,

sometimes a holistic form. So you have the possibility of creating memories for what is being processed right now, and then, depending on how important those things are for your life, they may stay on as permanent memories and be transformed or they may be just disposed of in the course of in the course of life. And then what is interesting too is that most of the time our perceptions

are not occurring in one modality only. So for example, right now there is a visual perception that we're both having an auditory perception, but also lo and behold, we have the perception quote unquote of what is happening in our own body. For example, if all of a sudden you would be you could be feeling hungry or thirsty, or you could have pain somewhere, that would be perceived as well, except that that would be arranged in a

different kind of system. There's a cortical component to it too, as well, but by and large it doesn't happen in the cortext that the most important part. They happen in the brain stem. They happen in the spinal cord. So you can have all of this fabrication of traces of things that are happening to you, inside your body and around you. They go to specific points in the nervous system,

not in one. It's very interesting as a parenthesis that very often people that don't know anything about the brain or about the mind studied in detail, can perfectly well believe that all of this is going into one great big tank, one great big sink, and it's all put together.

But it isn't. It's all separated at birth. It's all separated and goes into different points, and those different points where it occurs, they all already are sign of a convergence of signals, and then from there they can go to another set of stations where further integration of the signals is done, and by again the process of convergence of signaling a little bit of a pyramid going into a point, and then eventually you can have combinations of

those different pyramids, of those different cooking points and create something that is much larger that that's the great picture that I had for the convergence from multiple regions. And then what is interesting is that eventually you can have a combination of facts. For example, right now i'm talking to you, I have my perception review. I know that i'm talking to you of this particular process, which is really the process of learning and categorization and memory making.

But I also know that I just talked to my assistant and we talked about a couple of specific things that I need to get done as soon as I'm done talking to you. And I'm also looking at a page from Corina said. That's the Italian newspaper where there is a review of my new book. And it's very good, how it says, it's a lovely title, Body and Feeling the romance of Damasio.

review that happens to be on my desk. So things have a way of being integrated by the time at which they're occurring, but also by the happenstance of being here at the right moment, and so things that are not linked will be linked because at that time, in this case, the time and which I am talking to you, my eyes also fell on that page that was here on my desk actually just died anyway, So that's what I had in mind, and it has proven helpful to

explain problems of memory as well as making normal memory, because we know that when you can damage one part of this system, you don't lose memory across the board. You lose certain specific memories and memories of certain kinds, for example, that may be more related to the visual system than to another. Anyway, very complicated answer for a very complicated subject.

about humans. Areniquly developed about humans in terms of our meaning making facilities, And I'd love to kind of get into what is the neuro machinery and psychological process that allow us to do that, and why turtles can't.

and that's not the case. The same way. Actually, in our conversation yesterday by email, you mentioned something about your interests in covert processing in things that are not in fact in the mind, that I have to do with it with an intelligence that is capable that is not minded. And these are all different of this great big thing that we call our conscious minds, and that include a

lot of our conscious process. So if you take simple creatures, I wouldn't start with turtles, but I would something even simple like bacteria or a variety of creatures with only

a few cells and a humiliated cells. Those creatures have no nervous system to begin with, and yet they are intelligent and capable within the niche of universe in which they operate, and they can perfectly well detect certain the presence or absence of something, which is really a form of perception quote unquote, not a perception like we have

with detailed imaging exactly. Detecting and sensing are good words for that, except that very often they connote other things in the mind of people, and they can add to the confusion. But anyway, they can detect sense stuff, and they can with the machinery that they have, respond in a certain way that is consonant with what they detected. Now,

that is an intelligence thing to do. There's no question that it is adaptive and intelligent, and it is protecting them because they may detect something that they need, such as for example, food the food particle, or they may detect something that is potentially harmful, and that's good because it's going to protect their body and to allow them to live as long as their machinery is meant for it to live genetically speaking. Now, so that is intelligent,

but not minded and not conscious. Now, when you turn to what we do at the other end, and what many other creatures do in between. We have not only the capacity to detect sense stuff, but then we also have the capacity to represent what we detect it and also represent ourselves as victims of the detection. And we have the capacity to know that all of that relates to our unique bargains. So these three tiers are very very important to separate, and unfortunately, in the minds of

most people, this is one great big salad. And what I'm trying to do if you ask me what is the most important thing that I think I'm doing right now? In addition to explaining stuff that I'm passionate about, such as how you get to have a feeling, is actually

insisting on the separation. So you have a mind when you are capable of representing something that you detected, and fortunately for us, we have the capacity to represent tons of things depending on the different sensory channel we have help things outside of our bodies and inside of our lives. Then we have an intelligence provided we are capable of responding to things that are in our environment but not

necessarily representing it. And then we are conscious when we connect the thing that we are mindful of with our own organ is. The beauty of consciousness is that when you have when you have, for example, I'm looking at you, I know that it's need looking at you. Why do I know that? Well, that's exactly the problem of consciousness.

The image that you are helping generate in my brain is activating a variety of systems that are in my brain and body, and that connects the tool indolently and in such a way that I have no doubt that it's me talking to you, Scott. There's no question. That

is what consciousness is about. It's about creating the not disputable fact that I am doing my perceptions and you are doing your perceptions, and the two channels of operation, and then the two kinds of operation are over the same type, but they are occurring in different organisms.

to be conscious. And this makes your work very unique and very influential, that you really are arguing that there's a very important distinction.

can be, and as a result, almost anything goes. But pen psyche is helpful because, well, you know, maybe the reason why you can't explain it easily is because it's everywhere and something that's not inside us, really something that we capture from what's around us, which I find first no evidence for and second no way of testing, no way of doing an experiment that would cope with that.

matter about mind, always talks about the brain alone. You know, people said, we need to find out how the brain creates consciousness. Excuse me, why just the brain? Why this insistent insistence on the fact that the nervous system and the nervous system alone is the creator of these things. I dispute that I don't think it is. But you don't need to go to the surround spirits to find it.

It's in your own body. The logical march here is from creatures that are alives, have bodies, don't have nervous systems, to creatures that eventually our life have bodies and have nervous systems. And minds and consciousness are ultimately the product of a particular relationship between the living organisms body and the nervous system in that body. It's not that the nervous system is plucked and putting this inside our bodies and clear inside our skull and charged with creating minds

and creating consciousness. Not at all. I mean, of course, you cannot have minds and consciousness without a nervous system. But the nervous system is there as a partner in the process that can lead to better life regulation. The nervous system is a servant of homeostasies the same way that the body in general is a possessor of homeostatic operations that will allow that organism, that the living thing, to continue for a lot of amount of time.

How do I know that their mind? Well, they know that their mind because my nervous system is in constant interaction the organism in which it is located and without which it could not live.

the mind. But it seems like at the very best, maybe what we can do is just replicate Scott Berry Kaufman's mind, but I'm never going to be able to identify it with the forces. Could be sitting in a that of zero ones.

to make it conscious, that's another story. And for that, you know, it's almost an absurdity to think it could be conscious if it's not living, because the entire thing of the entire notion of consciousness is right now, you can have a simile lacra of consciousness. I have no problem with that. In fact, we have a paper that

probably you may know about. The paper is in Nature Machine Intelligence on whether on how you make this linkage between between a robot and a real body with minds and conscious capabilities, and it is a it's an interesting thing to discuss.

So we could start by saying this, what came first, feelings or emotions, And in all likelihood feelings did, because feelings are in fact mental expressions of certain states of the organism to begin with, and to begin with that to add with, because when you have an emotional feeling, you are also dealing with a state of your organisms. But let's start with feelings the way they likely began in the history of life, and the feelings that must

have been. The first were what I call homeostatic feelings, and they occurred in creatures with nervous systems. That's very important to realize. And by the way, on once you remember the strong link that I have between feelings and consciousness, you again to have this link between feeling and consciousness and nervous systems, you know, it doesn't make any sense to talk about it. If they're no nervous systems, they don't need any feelings if you systems anyway, So what feeling.

There's anesthetic feelings first to give in an organism that is multi sealuble and has the systems, is a sense actually a mental representation of something important that is happening in that body, such as, for example, being hungry or being thirsty, or having pain or feeling damn good. Those are the fundamental aesthetic feelings. Desire is too, but if we don't need to go there to earning them, monitor the desire.

It does use the language of feeling with its spontaneous, natural, occurring consciousness. And that's why I like to say that feelings were the inaugural events of consciousness one fine day, after lots of variations on the theme of organism regulation, this magic motion occurred within living organisms with nervous systems,

and that was feeling, and it is so successful. It is so good telling you immediately drink, eat, recoil from an attack, do something because you're having pain and it's probably going to kill you, do something to prevent it or avoid it, or go to the doctor. All of those things were extremely informational. They were giving you therein

then useful information to maintain your life. There's no way you could have proceeded life in a complicated organism with multice nervous system if you did not have that information. In other words, you went rapidly from five hundred million years ago. You went rapidly from having organisms that, unless they were lucky, they would die to organisms that even if they were not like lucky, they had enough information to do something useful about that life and to read

use the risk of death. And this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, and that's where I think consciousness began at the level of feeling. Now, because you wanted me to say things about feeling for your listeners, then I will also say that the confusion with emotion is a problem because what developed in living creatures as emotions, which don't develop with humans developed before and of course

are theatricals. There are certain kinds of expression that you can have in the body and in the face once you have a face that is manipulable with different muscle groups. It's certain kinds of expressions that register something that is happening to you, something that is in the environment, some reaction that you have to others. Examples feeling an emotion of fear when you are recoiling from something that potentially may attack and which is accompanied by a feeling of fear.

So this is where things get extremely complicated and people really need to think a little bit, because then it's clear as daylight. When you are having the emotion fear, your eyes bulge, you pull back and blow and behold, your body changed. And because your body changed, those changes are what produced the feeling of fear. But the emotion itself is a set of actions. By the way, the word emotion etemologically it's perfect. It's about the Latin air modery.

It's to move to the outside. You have its an actor studio. You know, you're just doing things. And by the way, if you have anger, the same thing. You know, it's a different sort of theatricals. But it's again represented in your body. And if you are terribly if you want to seduce somebody, you also do the corresponding theatricals. Then they also are felt because they are represented internally with your nervous system, and they can end up being

a feeling, which is subjective. Emotions by themselves are not subjective. Emotions by themselves are directed to the outside.

was the critical issue here. That's why this has a logic, which is the logic of life and the logic of survival that came first because it was so important for that organism. When you start having emotions, it's at a point in which you have already some complex interactions with other beings, and those other beings can cross you and you get angry, or they can do something, or the environment can do something that threatened zoo and you get

fear and so forth. So it's a different stage, and it's actually more It reflects a greater complexity of the organism, although in the end they don't need to be more complex as phenomena, but they're reflecting something else. But all of this can end up felt, and felt simply means that you automatically know it's in you, it's in your organism, and that also means that you are automatically conscious. The two things have to go together.

recounting the experience. I'm trying to do the experiment in my head to verify what you're saying scientifically, and it's yeah, you're you're right. I never really thought about that really, Yeah, so we may have feelings when we're lost in our own thoughts and when we're in touch with our.

it was totally delibrated by you. It's probably part of your repertoire emotional of emotional phenomenon when you communicate with others, because you have been doing it all your life, if you have adjusted yourself to the same spe all sorts of things that would be of that kind, or for example, the way your face is on a couple of times

already manifested doubt in relation to what I was saying. Oh, being puzzled, but puzzled in a way that was probably not positive, which is perfectly fine, But you will register or what you're doing right now, you know which you are. You know the fact that I said, it's perfectly fine, you reacted with laughter and quite behind exactly. But but but that is it's all. It's part of the interaction. You're doing it along with me in this social interaction.

And this has very little to do with being hungry or being thirsty or being in pain. You know, those are different things. Those are spontaneously occurring in relation to what your nervous system is getting in an interaction with its own body, or I like to say the opposite, it's the organism's own nervous system, because that's the way that that's the way it is, and it is it's

completely different. But by the way, one thing so that in case we end up because this is so interesting and we're doing in so many directions, so that I don't forget there's something fundamentally different about the perception of our body by our nervous system and the perception of the outside world. So for example, right now I'm perceiving you, and I can look out and perceive the you know,

the cinemonic amounts. There's no way that the I can go interactively with the cineamonic amount montas only with you, that's the level of the perceptual object. But with my body that happens. So if my body sends a signal from one particular point, say, for example, I'm actually I'm having pain in an act. Sorry to say, you're not opinion anyway, And that's because I was moving books yesterday and the day before and one of the times I carried too many books in one go and I twisted

muscles and I have a pain. But it's interesting is that there's there's signals that are coming from the muscles, that the muscle fibers that have been disrupted and fromly torn, and they are going into the spinal cording in this case the brainstead and then the central nervous system un all the way up to the to the context, although in many cases don't need to, Okay, well, it's interesting is that the signals come in and literally ascend in

the nervous system. But the nervous system as the possible needed to respond to the origin of the perception. So we have a cross stock between our body, it's non neural components and the nervous system. The non neural components of the body talk to the nervous system. The nervous system talks back one thing that it does that you experience constantly, as to do with pain or as to do with itch. For example, if you have an itch in your skin, skin is dry, itchy, Well, it's itchy

for a bit. You can scratch it a bit and we'll go. But then we'll come back. But then after a while, even if you don't do anything about it, it will go, and it will go because the simple never system is sending signals back to that place, doing at the local level chemical corrections of the environment so that the thing gets suggested. So it's never the case that you have a body here and a nervous system here, like I have my brain here and you on the screen.

There's no way that screen and you are going to do anything to my nervous system directly, whereas in the case of interception that happens all the time. So that's another fundamental way, which by the way, has been completely neglected by anybody that is doing theory on consciousness. With extremely rare exceptions, there's no way that you can understand this phenomenon without achnowledgy interception. That is the perception of the interior quote unquote is different in its design, in

its operation, from the perception of the outside work. Is that two things that are computed different. Now, of course, in our in our high functioning minds and brains, it all works together very well. Yes, they are different, and that's those those differences that give you an entry into problems like consciousness and that you can explore and exploit to your advantage for sure.

so to speak. In my view, there seems to be something different between the way I'm responding to you socially today, an actor would respond to you because I am feeling things that are correlated at a p less than point zero five level with the expression on my face. So it's not completely random, you know what.

that you know. While against somebody said, oh, so you talk about the amnisthetic feelings and you say that anisthetic feelings are the reason why you are conscious, and that you require them to be conscious spontaneously. And so but since I'm not hungry all the time, and I'm not harmy all the time, and I'm not at first the all the time, and then what happens that when I become unconscious between my hunger and thirst episodes, and I said, no,

you're you're you're constantly feeling. You have this continuous feeling of being alive. I've called it several times, a feeling of existence, the feeling of being alive. It's if you if you meditate a little bit, but if you just be quiet, you real you realize that there's something hummy in you, which is being alive, and which, by the way, if you would not be alive, which you would not notice it. Do you know that for sure?

the nervous system and the and the body. So it's inevitable. So you could say that the other feelings, the feelings of anger, of thirst, and so forth, a sort of if you plot it as a running graph, are things that come the crest on top of that hamming up and down. Feeling is constantly there on your monitor as the feeling of life, the feeling of existence.

that there is life sticking in there. The knowing very interesting question do you need to be in addition to it being there spontaneously. No question is asked, do we need to have a reflection on I don't think so. And I think that what is failing in schizophrenia is that's the level of a reflection on what is happening in that organism?

this emotion bitter sweet. But I know that you're really interested in mixed valence emotions, and I'm I'm absolutely namored with that as well. What's the role of these kinds of mixed emotions and in helping us have more complex cognitive prostis like creativity and meaning making.

a painting or a sculpture. They're very different, different levels of operation, different complexities, and they all take they all exploit this amazing high level of consciousness that we have gotten to, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why people are so confused about consciousness and why it is so difficult to bring them down to the simple fact that feelings us containeous events in consciousness, because most of what people have been thinking and reading about creativity,

about sorry about consciousness, has pulled them up and has taken them to not only high level consciousness, but to the consequences of high level consciousness in the form of the creative objects that are around us. So nobody ever started looking at consciousness from the bottom up. People start looking at consciousness in the extended consciousness that we have when we have this sort of literary sense of the universe together with the science that is a company and

creativity is so central to this. But again it sort of pushes you up where you have consequences of being conscious, but where the real operations are no longer in the domain of consciousness, but rather in the domain of knowledge

and creativity, in the domain of manipulation of knowledge. Now, of course, you couldn't manipulate that knowledge if you were not conscious to begin with, if you had not been so richly conscious that you gave two every little bit of knowledge that you have in your brain right now, you gave it the gift of conscious consciousness, which really means you gave it the possibility of connecting with your life.

That's it. You're conscious, even if you're thinking. You have just been listening to particular passage of Walls Are or Bach. Those are so incredibly complex in the way they were written or in the way they're being performed by a supersoloist, and that is only available to you if you can bring down that threat into your body and if you can connect it to the state of your body. At that point, that's when consciousness occurred. But of course we have spent most of our lives thinking about it from

the top at the level of extended consciousness. This is not even a good name. I told you, I coined it. So's yeah, I don't like to use extended. It's extended mine really consciousness.

Jordan Peterson and Shelley Carson did as well. So I think that's more of a bottom up approach along the lines of what you're talking about.

how that could potentially be connected to creativity. Do you, personally in your own work, do you do you see that as a central hub of creativity of the neuroscience of creativity.

that threads. That's a thread that's still open. Can we ever have filling machines? And you have argued in your book a new generation of filling machines can probably become efficacious assistance to really feeling humans as hybrids of natural and artificial creatures. No less important. This new generation of machines would constitute a unique laboratory for the investigation of human behavior and mind in a variety of actual, realistic settings.

So that's exciting coming down the pipeline. And when we can start to meld fast computer processors with the nervous system so we can get the coordinated effort of the elements you talk about in a way that has like a super duper hyped up processing capability, that could be.