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

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António Damásio

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“I will add that in any ingenious or new human thought, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone's head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.”

MindThoughtsIdeaFyodor DostoevskyThe Idiot
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“Can we, with the assistance of advanced technology and neurobiological facts, create an artifact with consciousness? Perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the question, I have two answers for it, and one is no and the other yes. No, we have little chance of creating an artifact with anything that resembles human consciousness, conceptualized from an inner-sense perspective. Yes, we can create artifacts with the formal mechanisms of consciousness proposed in this book, and it may be possible to say that those artifacts have some kind of consciousness. Some external behaviors of artifacts with formal mechanisms of consciousness will mimic conscious behaviors and may pass a consciousness version of the Turing test. But for all the good reasons that John Searle and Colin McGinn have adduced on the matter of behavior, mind, and the Turing test, passing the test guarantees little about the artifact's mind. More to the point, the artifact's internal states may even mimic some of the neural and mental designs I propose here as a basis for consciousness. They would have a way of generating second-order knowledge, but, without the help of the nonverbal vocabulary of feeling, the knowledge would not be expressed in the manner we encounter in humans and is probably present in so many living species. Feeling is, in effect, the barrier, because the realization of human consciousness may require the existence of feelings. The "looks" of emotion can be simulated, but what feelings feel like cannot be duplicated in silicon. Feelings cannot be duplicated unless flesh is duplicated, unless the brain's actions on flesh are duplicated, unless the brain's sensing of flesh after it has been acted upon by the brain is duplicated.”

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