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Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Antonio Damasio

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Antonio Damasio
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 25
Academic
Neurologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Lisboa
Antonio Damasio
António Rosa Damásio
Antonio Rosa Damasio
Politics
Economics
Freedom
Develop
Religion
Instruments
Culture
Morality
Permits
Science
Allow
Confrontation
Art
Consciousness
Permit
Nature
Technology
Ethics
Justice
Measure

More quotes by Antonio Damasio

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Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
Antonio Damasio
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We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.
Antonio Damasio
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We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.
Antonio Damasio
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There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
Antonio Damasio
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A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
Antonio Damasio
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The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
Antonio Damasio
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We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
Antonio Damasio
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...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
Antonio Damasio
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We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.
Antonio Damasio
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We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
Antonio Damasio
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Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.
Antonio Damasio
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Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.
Antonio Damasio
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When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.
Antonio Damasio
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There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.
Antonio Damasio
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I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
Antonio Damasio
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A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.
Antonio Damasio
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To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
Antonio Damasio
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What happens [in a coma] is that you lose the grounding of the self, you no longer have access to any feeling of your own existence.
Antonio Damasio
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Scott Fitzgerald said famously that he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for. But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.
Antonio Damasio
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How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
Antonio Damasio