The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (Lisbon, 1944) has spent years defending in books such as Descartes's error that the division between mind and body that the West has dragged on since ancient Greece is wrong: rationality is not possible without emotion. No feelings. If not, it ends in dogmatism, imperialism, fascism. In his penultimate book, The Strange Order of Things (Fate), he went further and stated that feelings are the origin of our culture: they prompted us to question ourselves about the world and try to solve the problems that posed to our survival. The director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at California Southern University publishes Sentir y saber (Destiny), in which he traces the evolution of consciousness from bacteria to artificial intelligence.
Damasio explains by videoconference that the new book has arisen “from the need to explain my theories in a different way. The question of consciousness is capital. And very controversial. We don't have one or two solutions for it, but four or five. It's a hodgepodge. There are even people who think that it is a mystery that will not be solved. And in this state of controversy, if not confusion, there is a temptation for someone like me, who thinks there are better answers than others, to talk about how we've progressed."
“We won't be able to download it to a computer, it would be copying the recipe instead of the plate of food”
In addition, he admits, his ideas have evolved. “The most important thing comes with the first word of the title, feel. I have always given importance to feelings, but I followed the flow of others who said that consciousness had to be explained starting at the top, explaining the most complicated first, such as vision, hearing, reasoning, creativity, and I think that is mistaken. They are subsidiary functions of feelings, feeling is the beginning of the story, it is what inaugurates consciousness. Then there are developments that allow us to be here today speaking in languages and translating my thoughts into English. Important, but it starts with feeling.”
Regarding the visions confronted in the field of consciousness, he points out that “one says that it is not explicable and it seems incorrect to me. Then we have others that start at a high level of complexity. They are unable to finish explaining the deep part, how we feel, how we experience. What is it I want to do. Then there are people who, desperate for an explanation, go in the opposite direction and say that consciousness is in everything in nature, in stone, matter. It is panpsychism and it is very difficult for me to understand how the stones are conscious. And there is a simple materialist position that says that all this has to come from matter and it will be found one day and meanwhile, we explain things gradually. Perception, language, parts of the puzzle, and finally we will have consciousness. It does not answer the crucial question."
His view is that at one point in evolution feelings hatched spontaneously. And they began to guide us. “Given a certain complexity in an organism that has a nervous system, both things combined allow the interaction of the representation of the body with the body itself. And from that interaction the feeling is born. Feelings give you direct information. They tell you if you are hungry, thirsty, if you are in pain, if you do not feel well or have desires... Information that allows us to act, make decisions. With the entry of feelings in evolution, you are no longer like bacteria or plants that have intelligent actions but do not know that they are. Humans continue to do many things with that covert intelligence, we don't have to tell the heart to beat, but we have a part of life driven by knowledge, and fundamental knowledge comes from feeling.
Some feelings that are an interaction between our body and our mind. “If you analyze them, they always tell you something about your life and your body. It is your task. If you say I'm down for something, I don't feel well, if you say what a beautiful day, I'm full of energy... these are feelings about the state of your body. They have to do with energy and the manipulation of energy, if there is enough or not, if we fall or ascend, the feeling is the ambassador of all these events. Consciousness is primarily about what happens inside the body, not about the world outside.
Today we identify feelings as something from our personal, external life, and Damasio understands that it is an equivalence of our internal structure. “Inner feelings, those that come from the body, are the master device and everything else is based on them. And they give us a feeling of self that allows us to certify that the things that are in your mind are in your body too and make everything in the world conscious, the music you hear, the things you see.
All this complexity leads him to venture that our consciousness cannot be downloaded to a computer: “It would be like copying a recipe instead of having the plate of food. Tarte tatin is one thing and having its recipe is another”. On the eternal free will debate, he says that we are puppets of pain and pleasure and occasionally have room for our creativity. “If you feel hungry and thirsty, do you have free will not to drink or eat? You are a servant or follower of those homeostatic feelings that are there to protect you from not doing the right thing to stay alive. On the contrary, when we are at a high point in our creativity we have moments of free will”.