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Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist, a professor, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He has received many honors throughout his career, and he’s written several books that I have right here on my shelf, including Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and The Strange Order of Things.

I’m quite obsessed with his new book, which is called Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness. In it, he presents a really beautiful explanation of consciousness, and how it is run by the body—by a certain kind of sensation that tells us what it’s like to be alive, how our life is going, and what we need to do about it. I’m going to let him explain it to you because it’s really quite profound coming from him.

Today, we also talk about the role that the sublime, spirituality, and awe play in our lives—along with broader implications of Antonio’s findings for the way we understand AI, and ourselves.

And at the end of our conversation, I’m going to share a passage from his book that I particularly loved.

His new book: Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness

Also by Damasio:

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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ELISE:

So thank you for joining me. It's interesting. I was thinking back, I've been doing this for a long time, not as long as you have been studying consciousness and homeostatic feelings and the mind-body connection, but I don't want to say that I've shied away from conversations about consciousness. I have just taken the hard problem of consciousness too literally. And I guess what I want to start with is that when I read Natural Intelligence, and I have many of your books, I'm looking at The Feeling of What Happens right now, that you boil it down to something quite simple, right? That maybe seems obvious?

ANTONIO:

Well, it's not exactly obvious, but I think I've tried to. I like boil it down. I think I've boiled it down to something understandable and something that connects with our lives without using strange language that most people will not use. It's really about experience and this discovery of our own existence and the discovery of a world that exists around us. It's that simple. And I think that most definitions of consciousness have been far more cumbersome and they've been tied too much to the process itself, the possible biological process. And I did not want to do that. I do have a very elaborate process to achieve consciousness, and I actually think I'm right. And I think we have the data to show it. We have the experiments. And just to be a little bit immodest, I think I've solved the problem. Was it hard? Yes, it was hard, but you have that experience because you are like me in the world of intellect.