Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

Damasio's central claim is that consciousness cannot be understood by focusing on the brain alone. While the brain plays an indispensable role, it requires input from the non-neural tissues of the body proper; feelings provide the mind with facts on the basis of which we know that whatever is in the mind belongs to us [citation:14]. He rejects the 'hard problem' framing that treats consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, and he rejects computational theories that portray the mind as substrate-independent software [citation:17]. Consciousness, for Damasio, is a biological process rooted in homeostasis—the imperative of living systems to maintain and flourish—and it emerged gradually from simpler forms of sensing and feeling.

Damasio distinguishes three evolutionary stages that are often conflated. Sensing is the basic responsiveness of living organisms—bacteria and plants sense their environments without any mind or consciousness; anesthetics suspend this sensing in bacteria and plants, placing them in literal hibernation [citation:2]. Feeling is the mental perception of the body's internal state, arising later in evolution and requiring a nervous system; feelings report on whether conditions are favorable or unfavorable for homeostasis [citation:16]. Consciousness is the most advanced stage, building on feeling and enabling an inner self in the act of knowing. In the absence of sensing, Damasio argues, we cannot build up the operations that gradually enable plain minds, feelings, and self-reference [citation:2].

Kirkus Reviews described it as 'a short but definitely not superficial investigation of consciousness,' praising Damasio's lucid prose and his concise, helpfully divided short chapters. The reviewer noted that the book is 'as much a work of philosophy as hard science,' rewarding readers familiar with college-level psychology and neuroscience [citation:14]. The New York Times Book Review called it 'one thrilling insight after another' and said Damasio 'succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind' [citation:9]. Library Journal recognized it as relying on recent discoveries in neurobiology, psychology, and AI to explain what consciousness really is [citation:10]. Some readers may find the near-abstract concepts enervating, but experts will appreciate its unconventional thinking [citation:17].

Feeling and Knowing synthesizes and extends themes Damasio developed across his previous books. The critique of brain-centrism echoes Descartes' Error (1994), where he first challenged the separation of reason from emotion and the body. The distinction between sensing, feeling, and consciousness elaborates ideas from The Feeling of What Happens (1999), particularly the role of the proto-self and core consciousness. The focus on homeostasis as the foundation of mind and culture builds directly on The Strange Order of Things (2018), which argued that feelings drove the making of human cultures [citation:8]. Damasio himself notes that he wrote this shorter book to remedy a frustration: the ideas he cared most about were getting 'lost in the middle of long discussions' in his earlier, larger volumes [citation:17].

A frequent misconception is that Damasio claims feelings are the same as emotions, or that consciousness is simply the experience of bodily sensations. In fact, he carefully distinguishes emotions (bodily responses such as changes in heart rate and posture) from feelings (the mental experience of those bodily changes) [citation:16]. Another misreading treats his position as a form of biological reductionism, when his argument is closer to a non-reductive embodied view: the mind is 'a product of the brain but also of its interaction with the body,' and the specific chemistry of living tissue is essential [citation:16]. A third misconception is that he denies the brain's importance; he does not, but insists the brain does not generate consciousness alone [citation:14].

Damasio argues that computers cannot possess consciousness because they lack the vulnerability and homeostatic regulation of living bodies. Computers are made of durable materials, while every cell in a living body is at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death; a living system is maintained against all odds by a mechanism that can fall apart with minimal malfunction [citation:19]. Moreover, the operations of the nervous system responsible for emotion and feeling rely far more on non-synaptic messaging than on the all-or-none synaptic signaling that can be described in binary terms. While AI has succeeded with high-level reasoning tasks like chess and Go, Damasio contends that the basic systems organizing life—regulation, emotion, feeling—do not match the computational model [citation:19].