Damasio

Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error, Looking for Spinoza) has a new book, Self Comes to Mind. He talked about in on SciFri the other day.

I like what he says about creativity and consciousness:

Without consciousness--that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity--you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think. Had subjectivity not begun, even if very modestly at first, in living creatures far simpler than we are, memory and reasoning are not likely to have expanded in the prodigious way they did, and the evolutionary road for language and the elaborate human version of consciousness we now possess would not have been paved. Creativity would not have flourished. There would have been no song, no painting, no literature. Love would never have been love, just sex. Friendship would have been mere cooperative convenience...

I think he's been reading some James. And maybe Lanier. He said some gracious and charitable things on the radio about philosophers, and about how he doesn't think neuroscientists can figure it all out by themselves.

Good. Many minds are better than one.