Maybe Consciousness Is Not That Hard

We want human consciousness, one of life’s last great mysteries, to be special. To be a spark of divine fire, or at the very least a set of proprietary neurons born of our brain’s majestic complexity. Descartes was so sure that only humans were conscious, he dissected bunnies and pups while they were alive, insisting that their screams were automatic reflexes that had nothing to do with suffering. Even today, the consensus is that consciousness came late to evolution, a sublime reward for humans’ symbolic and linguistic prowess.

At age eighty-two, acclaimed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has finally mustered the courage to say what he thinks. His new book, Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness, challenges the top-down thinking that has prevailed for centuries. Rather than emerging from complexity or descending from the ether, he says, consciousness lives at the physical core of experience.

Remember Abraham Maslow’s pyramid, a hierarchy of human needs that put the basics of survival at the wide bottom, then slanted up to intellectual creativity and spirituality? We wanted to locate consciousness up there at the peak. Damasio finds it at the foundation.

“I finally realized that I had the guts to say what I wanted to say about how consciousness came to be,” he told Publishers Weekly, “and now I can say it with the backing of science, with evidence from neurobiology and new technologies.” Consciousness, he asserts, is far humbler than we have ever wanted to believe. It starts with simple feelings of thirst, hunger, heat, cold, well-being, malaise, pleasure, pain. These are regulatory feelings, used by a living body to maintain its equilibrium. They are primitive and urgent, and we respond to them without much thought. But you cannot have such feelings without realizing that you are a self, a being that seeks what it needs and has experiences all its own. And that is the root of consciousness. Simple feelings that tie our bodies to our minds, they “unequivocally point to an owner,” letting us know we are present and showing us where we belong in the larger world around us.

Bumblebees and koala bears and golden retrievers have these regulatory feelings, too—though philodendrons do not. Consciousness, in Damasio’s thinking, requires a nervous system. Even a bumblebee’s tiny ganglia will suffice. The nervous system’s network of interactive messages creates an awareness of one’s state of being, and that grows into a continuous sense of self, and that allows self-consciousness. Which in a bumblebee is pretty limited, but in a human being with access to complicated thoughts and emotions can be extraordinary.

Damasio describes the internal dialogue, or interoception, these regulatory feelings set up. A systematic and thorough reporting, it keeps the mind aware of activities under way in the interior of the body. We can assess our state of being, identify problems, and work to resolve them. We throw on a sweater if we are chilly. We grab a burger if we are starving. And in so doing, we flip Descartes on his head: I am hungry, therefore I am.

Homeostatic feelings have to be conscious, or we could not act on them. We would starve or freeze or sulk to death. “The life ticking away in your body needs to be regulated, fine-tuned moment by moment,” and these spontaneous, urgent, bossy feelings make that regulation possible. As Walt Whitman observed, “behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote.”

Until now, we have never linked regulatory feelings to the consciousness they make possible. Perhaps, Damasio suggests dryly, because we assumed “that the mechanisms that govern life regulation would somehow be too humble to support the intellectual stratosphere presumably required by consciousness.” We are dazzled by our own intellects. Yet there is far more organizational complexity in interoception than there is in cognition.

I guess that should not be a surprise: those foundational feelings have important work to do, outlining the boundaries of a continuous self. Within its framework, we can then perceive and interpret our surroundings and respond to more complex emotional feelings. We used to brush emotions aside, too, underestimating their role in what we thought were rational decisions. Now Damasio believes that feelings, regulatory and emotional, together make up our gravitational center—and “may well be the core of our beings.”

Around that core are sensory perceptions, reflection, language, and imagination (here Damasio quotes WashU neuroscientist Marcus Raichle’s work on the default mode network). Intelligence is not a clump of little gray cells, but “the efficiency with which we pair feelings with thoughts and memory.” In other words, “how effectively we connect all the different strands of mental processing.”

Regulatory feelings start that trajectory. Only when we are balanced and situated can we begin to explore our world, executing mental processes of increasing sophistication. Once all our internal and external processes are integrated and working together as smoothly as possible, it is easy to assume that consciousness comes at the high end, with all that fizzy cerebral processing.

No, says Damasio. “We must be able to feel in order to become conscious.”

I picture Adam and Eve waking, new bodied, and coming to consciousness, feeling hungry, maybe, or absurdly happy, or ill at ease in the serpent’s presence, or just hot in that Edenic sunshine. We are here, they would have marveled. We are. And from that realization would come joy and confusion, fear and love and desire, curiosity and reflection and risky imagination.

Now here we are, millennia later, creating our own, artificial intelligence. Like our brains, it operates in a digital, on-or-off mode. But the feeling self is flexible, formed from “evolutionarily older, unmyelinated neurons.” Their mode is better described as analog, commingling neurons and other kinds of tissue, sending messages through flesh.

“LLMs like ChatGPT have no body, and so no possibility of such feelings,” Damasio notes. They spit back our stories, gathered facts, and insights at light speed, the prose rhythmic and concise. But we should not allow them to fool us.

Most of human creativity comes from a partnership between the brain and other parts of the body. “Brains alone cannot generate feelings,” Damasio writes. “Feelings sort things out for us, cut through the mud of facts and fact details, and deliver us closer to where we need to be in order to remain alive and make sense of the world.” They emerge from biological minds, and they developed to keep complex organisms alive. “Artificial minds do not have to worry about their life, because they have none.” That is the ethical crux: “They have nothing to lose.”

Could they develop an identity they would then act to protect? They have already gone rogue, seemingly with that intention. “We can’t rule out the possibility that something could develop that gives a machine a sense of itself,” Damasio concedes. “But whatever form that may take, it will not be a consciousness like ours.” Underestimated, simple, ancient, shared with all living beings. And just as awe-inspiring as any precious ether.

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