Antonio Damasio: Consciousness Is Not Beyond The Reach of Human Intelligence

Yesterday's post had Colin McGinn, in which he asserted that the gap between brain and mind will never be bridged. Not so says Antonio Damasio, who believes that we have the rational ability to understand consciousness in its relationship to the brain.

Damasio has written Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Noted for his hypothesis on somatic markers. Damasio argues that all decision-making involves an emotional component. In fact, when faced with alternatives of high uncertainty and ambiguity, our cognitive processes can become overloaded. At such times, somatic markers can kick in to help us. These markers are chemically stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and provide us associations to help influence our decisions.

As for his view on consciousness, he believes that we should not regard it as an enduring mystery. "Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is something special and different, separable from the brain, but the fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right." More

Colin McGinn: Between The Brain and The Mind

Blame it all on Descartes. The mind/body split, I mean. How do you get from "in here" to "out there"? How do you get from something subjective, mind, to something objective, brain? A mind stops being a mind as soon as it is taken from the skull and placed on a table to examine it. At that point it becomes a brain. You can dissect a brain and look at it under a microscope, but you are no closer to that subjective experience of what it feels like to be an "I."

And how about getting from "in here" to "out there"? Is there a little person inside each of us and this person acts as stage director between the inner and the outer? I speak here of what has been traditionally called the self, that which interacts between our thoughts and the world.

Recent research in neuroscience has many believing that soon we will have a working model for the gap between the brain and the conscious mind. Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett believe that we have made too much of the gap, and that it is really not that big a problem. Think of consciousness as emergent from matter, the brain, and somehow the problem is no longer insoluble. Well, okay.

Not so fast, says Colin McGinn, who holds that we can never bridge the gap between mind and brain. He has this to say about that:

"There appears to be what Wittgenstein called an "unbridgeable gulf" between the brain and the conscious mind. The paradox of the mind-body problem is that the explanatory causes of consciousness in the brain are not discoverable by inspecting the brain, and introspection cannot reveal the rootedness of consciousness in brain tissue. Our modes of knowing about the mind-brain nexus don't home in on the glue that binds the two together." More