Feeling conscious

This week I read a little book by Antonio Damasio titled "Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious." Damasio is a prominent neuroscientist and author. "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" is another of his books; you get the idea. He's an atheist, interested in explaining consciousness in materialist terms. (Materialist: a person who supports the theory that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.)

A dozen or more years ago I read part of an earlier book by Dams -- I think it was "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain." I gave up before finishing it. It seems to me that he defines his way toward explanations. If you define things a certain way, you can build them into a theory of how it all works, but this means you have to keep those specific definitions in mind as you struggle onward through the text. Since the words he defines are ones that are used broadly in non-scientific contexts (i.e., mind, emotion, conscious) you have to keep reminding yourself of the narrowness of the terminology as you read. You also encounter names for regions in the brain, which are unfamiliar to me. The science of consciousness comes out of knowing something about what kind of information each of these areas process and how they interact. I was reading this earlier book at night. There was more falling asleep going on than there was  comprehending, and eventually I gave up. 

"Feeling and Knowing" was on the new book shelf at the library. It is literally a little book, small in format. Though it's more than 200 pages, the chapters are short and there's plenty of white space where one chapter ends and the next begins. It seemed readable. In the intro, "Before We Begin," Damasio explains that this book chips away at all the "connective tissue and scaffolding" of earlier, longer writings to present the ideas he most cares about in concentrated form, like poetry. 

So it was an easier read, 20 or 30 minutes in the morning for several days. It reads more like philosophy than science, so it seemed an appropriate book for a time of day when I often read something spiritual or devotional. I put enough effort and intention into reading that I feel it merits a book report, to challenge me to put this all in my own words as a check on whether I understood what I read. 

Basically, says Damasio (I think!) minds become conscious when they recognize themselves as the ones doing a thing or having a perception. They can do this because feelings that originate in an organism's nervous system connect body to brain and, importantly, brain back to body.  In the 17th century Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Damasio's version is "I feel, therefore I am." 

Okay, that's grossly over-simplified. You need a longer and more exacting discussion of what feeling is in neuro-scientific terms before you use it in a materialist understanding of consciousness. Feeling arises in the nervous system, which is the body keeping track of itself. The nervous system has millions of cells and sends billions of messages to itself about feeling. There's a distinction between perceptions of the sensory system and information recorded by the nervous system in feeling. Sight, hearing, and touch perceive things that are outside the body and independent of it. Feeling is the body interacting with itself and thus aware of itself, aware of being in the world. 

As I read I thought back to being a young child in the dark, confined to bed because, you know, bedtime, but unable to fall asleep as quickly as my sisters in the same room. With nothing to hear, nothing to look at (and no reading lamp next to my bed at that age), I would start to wonder who or what I was. Was if I was a machine or a robot in the middle of a world inhabited by some other kind of creatures, who were not machines? Who or what was living in my interior world? Funny, at age six or seven I didn't wonder about how the world looked to other people, to other children my age. I was conscious of my own singularity. I assumed I was a one-of-a-kind consciousness. Maybe I didn't yet have the necessary neurons or the necessary experience encoded in neurons to think about other people being conscious in the world. Even now, it doesn't come naturally. I have to step on the brakes, put my hands on the steering wheel, and maybe turn on the headlights before my brain can see through another person's windshield. 

Bessel Van Der Volk's book The Body Keeps the Score fits into this world of feeling and knowing, as it details how the nervous system records experience as feeling and how feeling and knowing are more than verbal, conscious exercises. If you've had the experience of grief unexpectedly welling up in your gut or your tear ducts, you know this, just as you might know it from the feeling of wordless awe, even joy, you experience when you see the colors of a sunset or the majesty of a mountain. A pile-up of feelings produces how we react to all kinds of things, and it takes some introspection to pick that all apart and understand it. 

Words are helpful. Just like money. They turn values into currency to exchange with others and use for our own planning purposes.

This is  The Perverse Lutheran blog, so I can't very well finish without talking about the traditional Christian concept of a human soul and of God. These don't have a place in Damasio's materialist world, and I confess, I don't know what they mean in my world. That Gwen-child becoming aware of her own consciousness had already had plenty of religious training; naming the mystery of it all "God" made it scarier. I could take the creationist view and say, yes, science is great, but with the complexity of it all, the many remaining unknowns -- well, you need God to explain all that. But jumping from science to superstition seems to easy. It shorts the circuits. 

So I'm left wondering, awed, brain exercised, on a bright Saturday morning. Feeling, thinking, knowing -- I still have to load the dishwasher, find a tablecloth, maybe bring down some Christmas decorations from the attic. Consciousness getting real and changing the input it's getting from my surroundings.