New Podcast Release: Antonio Damasio

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about the roots of consciousness, which animals are likely to be conscious, Descartes’ error and what Spinoza got right, the mind-body connection, and how understanding the links between our bodies and our minds can help us to live well.

Damasio draws on decades of neuroscience research to explain why consciousness begins not in the cerebral cortex, as many assume, but in the brainstem. This has powerful implications for how we understand the experiences of other animals, from mammals to fish and even insects.

We also explore why consciousness is deeply embodied, rooted in feelings that emerge from the regulation of life itself. Antonio discusses the evolutionary function of pain, hunger, and wellbeing and why these homeostatic feelings are essential to survival and to the possibility of living well.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

On the Function of Feelings

KASIA:
You argue that reason is deeply tied to bodily states, that the mind is embodied, and this has profound implications for how we think about wellbeing. Should we rethink the way we define a well-lived life in light of this? Instead of seeing it as an intellectual or abstract pursuit, should we place more emphasis on bodily awareness, physical health, sensory experiences, and so on?

ANTONIO:
The answer is clearly yes. I wouldn't have any doubt about that. And I think that one of the major problems historically in the study of mind and brain functions has been the lack of concern and regard for anything that has to do with feelings and affect. I'm really talking about feelings, not emotions, which unfortunately are constantly confused. You write about feeling, and people respond with emotion. So I go through a rant in which I say, look, we're talking about feelings, about something that you experience and that you and only you have access to. We cannot see your feelings, although we can see your emotions in some way. And that produces another kind of feeling, which is feelings of emotion.

What we're mostly interested in and this actually has to do with all of our recent research, we're interested in the feelings that are generated by the process of homeostasis. So with living creatures, we have our life to live, and that life is extremely vulnerable. There are numerous occasions in 24 hours where you could go astray and damage your life. And the only reason why you stay alive for days on end and continue thriving is because you have homeostatic feelings that are constantly providing you with clues as to whether your biological operations are in the right direction or are going wrong. This is actually very simple, because some of those homeostatic feelings are totally common, such as hunger, thirst, pain, wellbeing, malaise. These are homeostatic feelings that have been nicely planted by evolution in our package of capabilities and that are constantly telling us, “Things are going wrong, go and eat,” or, “You are thirsty, you need to drink,” or “You have pain, you better find out why,” or, “Everything is going very well.” And then you have a license to explore the world and explore your surroundings and do something good for you, such as finding a good mate.

And this is very important for me. I've just been writing several papers on consciousness and on why it's there, how it came about. My take on that is exactly the opposite of the take of most of my colleagues who bring it from on high and bring it from the top, from intellect. I say no—consciousness is a very humble form of regulation. It uses these very simple homeostatic feelings to alert you and guide you in the right direction.

Then, of course, we have all the possibilities of developing our intellect and making things more complicated. But that is the beginning. It's an evolutionary beginning, and it's tied to the fact that life needs to be managed, and that life can only be managed if you have knowledge of what is wrong or what is right so that you can guide your operations in that life.

So homeostatic feelings are critical. And the other thing that is critical is to understand the profound difference between homeostatic feelings and the entire feeling apparatus, and the apparatus of intellect. There's probably no better way of explaining this than using some analogy with things like artificial intelligence.

The book that I've just finished is called Natural Intelligence, and the subtitle is And the Logic of Consciousness. The adventures of natural intelligence can take you very far. And when you realise that there are these homeostatic feelings, we as scientists want to know how they come about, what's the background, the physiological background for homeostatic feelings?

It's interesting, because it's profoundly different from anything that happens in our perception. So, I see the two of you with the aid of some of the best biological achievements—which happen to be my retinas and my connections to my visual system. I form these beautiful images of the two of you with lots of colour and shape and even depth generated by the images. And all of this depends on an operation of the nervous system that really relies—back to my beginnings, Boolean algebra—it’s about zeros and ones. The neurons that are part of this exteroceptive system, both in what I'm hearing and what you're hearing, and what I'm seeing, or what I'm touching or smelling, all of that depends on neurons that came late in evolution.

They were the last ones. They are extremely sophisticated in their structure, and they have abundant myelin, so that the axons are totally insulated, as a result of which they operate very much like an AI device, with zeros and ones. You’re either active or not active. Zero. They have nothing at all of a gradation, which is exactly what happens with the systems that support our feelings.

Those are based on neurons that have practically no myelin, and therefore have axons that are totally exposed and operate on the basis of biological arrangements that are now beginning to be understood. For example, take the vagus nerve, which is one of the main nerves that brings information about every nook and cranny of our body into the central nervous system. The nerve trunk of the vagus has all of these axons that are next to each other, but 80% of them are not myelinated. As a result, the axons are talking to each other. They’re sending signals to each other. And it varies with the place in which you are in the trunk of the vagus. That is exactly the kind of biological process that can give you what we so appreciate, which is this grading that makes us feel well, or tired, or nauseated, or delighted with some good food we eat, or delighted when we are in love.

This is all about a system that, of course, AI cannot reach at all because it doesn't have life or a body, and it doesn't have these devices. All they have is these funny devices that are on or off, and they're very happy with it because, of course, you can do lots of marvellous things with that—including ChatGPT, no problem—but it doesn't have feelings. First of all, there's no reason why it should have feelings. It's not alive, so there's no motivation to have feelings to find out if it's working well or not so well. And we can do very interesting things with it. For example, we have a project with one of my former students, a very smart man called Kingson Man—that's his name—and we are trying to introduce vulnerability in AI systems. That vulnerability ought to give us some kind of simulacrum of the life of the interoceptive system. But even we don't expect those systems that are equipped with that vulnerability to feel or to communicate their feelings to us, because they couldn’t do that. But it could be that introducing vulnerability in the systems might actually make them work better than if we were trying to do the opposite, which is refine them to the hilt and make them work perfectly.

On Consciousness in Non-Human Animals

KASIA:
It's absolutely fascinating. But while you were talking, I thought, is it possible that feelings are wrong sometimes? That they lead us astray, that instead of showing us what we should fear or be happy with and so on, they just miss the point?

ANTONIO:
That's a very interesting question. First of all, I think that a lot of psychiatric conditions are exactly that. They come from the fact that feelings are misguiding the process. So the answer to your question is yes, they could. But presumably, it'll not be if you are lucky enough to be “normal.” In general, they're probably not going to be misguiding you, but they're incredibly vulnerable, because again, it's a machine that is, shall we say, primitive. It's very, very simple.

So interesting that we're talking about this because with one of my graduate students, we are finishing a paper that we're actually going to send out today on interoception. So we talked about exteroception—so, looking out into the world. And then we have something that's not terribly interesting called proprioception, which has to do with a world inside our bodies, which is the world of muscles. Our musculature, and especially the striate musculature, is supporting proprioception. And that's how I get to know where my arms are and how I control my hands or my gait and so forth.But then, visceroception or interoception—the same word, they're synonyms—is really this other world. And people have not studied it. So we now have all of these devices that are operating, and they have funny names like volume transmission, EPSPs, the system of the vagus nerve. All of them are devices that play no role whatsoever in what we're doing right now, which is dealing with these intellectual subjects, dealing with factual information and reasoning over that factual information.

There are these other processes that are there literally in every place of our body, collecting information about how things are going and bringing that information through several avenues into the central nervous system. Like for example, this vagus nerve system. And by the way, it's called vagus because it's "vagus"—it's everywhere. It goes in every part of our body. And then it brings that information into a nucleus in the brainstem called the nucleus tractus solitarius.

And the nucleus tractus solitarius collects that information and then receives abundant other signals from other routes. And it is really a compact of information about how life is proceeding in our organism. It has access to everything—the things that are going wrong, the things that are going right. And again, it had to be spontaneously conscious, or there would be no gain.

That's why I like to say that consciousness started because of our life. And that's the reason. It's not because we want to understand Descartes. It's much simpler than that. But it's interesting that this nucleus tractus solitarius is actually located in the upper brainstem. It's not in the cerebral cortex, where so many people want to place consciousness. Not at all. It's in the brainstem.

And it's very interesting, because the main reason for states of coma in neurological conditions in which people lose the possibility of having consciousness are actually lesions—damage to that. So it's to the area where you collect information about your body that, lo and behold, gives you the possibility of being conscious—not at all regions of the brain that are giving you a view of the cosmos, or a view of the outside world around you, or a view of the sounds you hear. Not at all. It's something extremely low-level, but it's in charge of regulating your life.

PETER:
That's very interesting. I will follow that up, because as you know, much of my life has been involved with looking at the ethics of the way we treat non-human animals, and this debate depends, of course, on information about which non-human animals are conscious and what their consciousness is like. And you just said that the roots of consciousness are not in the cerebral cortex, but in the brainstem, which would suggest that we don't need this big cerebral cortex to be conscious.

So does that mean that there are, in fact, a lot of non-human animals—certainly vertebrates—who we can assume are conscious and can feel pain, for example, and whose lives can go well or badly?

ANTONIO:
Absolutely. Consciousness is not at all a human property solely. It's well distributed. As long as you have a nervous system, and that nervous system has a considerable amount of complexity, you have the possibility of developing consciousness.

I would exclude, of course, bacteria and a variety of unicellular organisms. I don't think there's any possibility of consciousness there. I think what they have is something else that I call sensing. There is a possibility of sensing something that is not going to be conducive to the continuation of life, and there's a response to that sensing in the form of some reaction. But that reaction—the sensing and the reaction—are not known to the organism. In other words, the bacterial subject does not really exist. The entire organism of the bacterium is going to sense something that could kill it and move away, and seek protection. But all of that is automatic. That does not result in an experience by the organism.

And exactly the same thing applies to plants. They also do not have a nervous system. They do highly elaborate things that have to do with where they get their water, their respiration. All of that is very complex. But there's no cerebrum, there's no nervous system to begin with that could collect information and could give the plant an experience of what it has.

So any organism that does not have a nervous system, I think, is excluded from consciousness in the sense that consciousness provides you with an experience that is internal and is an experience of life in your own organism. That's the first thing that consciousness has to give you. And that is excluded for plants and for organisms without nervous systems in general.

On the Roots of Consciousness

KASIA:
I am just thinking how difficult it is to imagine, because usually we think of consciousness as something being aware of your own existence—but through language that we use. I mean, I can't separate being an adult and think now, I have this problem of separating thinking of who I am from experiencing myself. And it seems from what you say that consciousness is just this, experiencing the existence, right?

ANTONIO:
I think that consciousness begins with feelings of existence. And I even have a proposal: those feelings of existence that allow you to feel existence are feelings related to respiration, related to heartbeat and circulation.

They are very general, and they're giving you the sense of living, of life inside an organism. And they are absolutely critical. But I think that it's so interesting. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that you have difficulty imagining a separation between the linguistic process or the reflective process and consciousness itself. I have no such difficulty, I confess, because I'm trying to think about organisms that are not endowed with language. So I'm thinking about, for example, a dog. There's a dog of very close friends of ours, and I've spent a considerable amount of time with that dog, looking at what he does and does not do. And he has no language. I mean, he has language reduced to the use of his name, and of the names probably of a few people that may be recorded there. He certainly responds if you call him by his name. But the majority of time, he does not weave any interoceptive imagery into linguistic processes. There's no translation going on there. It's not possible. And by the way, it's not possible because his brain actually lacks the kind of modules that would be able to make the linguistic translation. So he has a natural state of experience in which he's experiencing both his organism, and clearly he is, because he will go and drink if he's thirsty, and he will ask for food if he's hungry, and if he has a fever, he will respond to that as well.

So he's experiencing that. But there's no language. There's no soundtrack with the language or no subtitles. It's just the pure experience.

On AI and Consciousness

PETER:
Another question that you just reminded me of then: is the implication from what you said about the embodiment and the on-off nature of artificial intelligence, that there never could be a conscious AI? Because of course, there's a lot of debate about that, and a lot of people think that we will eventually get conscious AI. Do you reject that?

ANTONIO:
I don't reject it, but I want to see it explored experimentally, and we're trying to do that. We're right now engaged in a project in which we are introducing vulnerability in AI devices, and we are going to construct machines, real machines, that have this vulnerability as a component. Now of course, those machines still don't have a life. What I think we will be able to create is a simulacrum of mechanisms of interoception because there's going to be an organism, and we are going to find ways of bringing signals from the “body,” of the AI device into a central part of the AI device, so, something that imitates interoception in the way that I just described it for you earlier. Now, that is going to bring information into that device, and it could organize and orient the behaviour of that robotic creature in relation to the future. That still does not mean that that creature is having an experience of what is going on. But I don't exclude it completely. What I think is going to be is a different kind of experience, because what we feel is the result of the matter with which we're constructed. We feel because of interoception, because of the vulnerable cells that we have in our system. That's a very particular condition. So AI could never imitate that exactly, I think. But it can, in a schematic way, imitate the consciousness process.

On Spinoza and the Unity of Mind and Body

PETER:
The thing that I really liked about your book Looking for Spinoza is that towards the end, you raise the question of did Spinoza himself live well? Did he live a good life? And you examine that both in the sense of what his understanding of living well was, and also to evaluate that.

So can you tell us a little bit about how Spinoza understood living well, and whether—despite the fact that he lived alone, a rather solitary life, that he was very frugal, certainly had no luxuries, didn’t care for money, his health was not good, and he was only 44 when he died—did he still live a good life despite all of that?

ANTONIO:
I think so. I wish I could go back to my book and read again what I wrote about that, because I remember that is one of the things that most intrigued me was his life. Such an exotic character. But I think my conclusion was that yes, he lived a good life.

And I remember that Hanna and I would go to the places where he lived and make jokes like, "Here we are visiting Spinoza again,” or something like that because we spent time there with that curiosity.

PETER:
I've read it more recently than you have obviously, because I refreshed my memory of it for this interview. And you do think that he was content. And it's interesting because, as you talked in terms of homeostasis about us finding a mate is one thing, but Spinoza never found a mate. Doesn't seem really to have looked for a mate. And on the other hand, he had this intellectual life, and he seems to have had the view that understanding the world we're in—that understanding itself—is a part of what it is to live well. So you would endorse that claim as well, that to live well, we need to understand our situation and who we are and where we're living?

ANTONIO:
I wouldn't be that rigid. I think that you can live well without having that great understanding. I think that there are people that lead wonderful lives and live great lives and don't have that understanding.

But I think that for people like us that have identified or were privy to problems that exist in our lives, I think having an understanding of those problems is extremely helpful. And it gives you an entry into some kind of balance, which is very difficult to maintain otherwise.

But I don't think it would be exactly the same for all individuals. Look at the three of us, preoccupied with all of this nonsense of Spinoza and Descartes and so forth. What a pastime! But most people in our world are not preoccupied with those questions.

But I think being preoccupied with those questions and having been exposed to them, then having some kind of answer, is going to be helpful. And that leads you into a life well lived.

On Living Well

KASIA:
Exactly. And that's the question. The question about a good life is something that we are all occupied with, right?

ANTONIO:
Absolutely.

KASIA:
So what do you think? What would be a good life for you? Do you think that you've lived well?

ANTONIO:
That is a terrible question.

KASIA:
Sorry.

ANTONIO:
No, no, no. It is. It is.

KASIA:
We always ask this question, so—

ANTONIO:
Well, no, that's actually a very good question. And the honest answer is that it depends on the days. So there are days in which I feel that my life has been well lived, and I've been very, very fortunate. And it’s very interesting because I was just thinking the other day how easy it is in the end. It can come very easily if you're doing the right thing.

PETER:

I'd like to prompt you to say a little more. So you, as you learned things about the brain and the relationship between the brain and mind and life, through having opportunities at Iowa to look at patients and also new technology that developed, that enabled you and Hanna to find out what was going on in the brain. Is this an important part of what it is to live well? You've made new discoveries, you've advanced knowledge.

ANTONIO:

Yeah. For me it certainly is. But the living well, this is interesting again, in the context of Spinoza. It has a lot to do with others. It has a lot to do with, in my case, with Hanna. So the human component, which in our case comes from friends, is very important. I can't imagine it would be a good life without that, although Spinoza could.