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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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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
Many
Complex
Going
Witness
Organization
Function
Levels
Robust
Sort
Functions
Simple
Organisms
Self
Complexes

More quotes by Antonio Damasio

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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.
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A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
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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.
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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?
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I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.
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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Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.
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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In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
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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You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.
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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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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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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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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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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The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.
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