Antonio Damasio | Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

welcome to the Free Library of Philadelphia online my name is Jason Freeman I'm a producer and editor here in the free libraries author events office and I'm honored to be here to introduce tonight's author Antonio damasio for the and this is for the Horus W Goldsmith Foundation endowed lecture so much thanks uh to everyone involved with that so one of the world's leading neuroscientists Dr Antonio damasio has made Watershed contribution to the understanding of how our brains process emotions decisions and Consciousness he is the David Doran professor of Neuroscience psychology and philosophy and director of

the brain and creativity Institute at the University of Southern California Los Angeles his prolific body of work includes scores of scientific articles and several books including de cars errror the feeling of what happens in the strange order of things a member of The Institute of medicine uh of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences uh Dr damasio is the recipient of some of the scientific community's most prestigious Awards he joins us tonight with feeling and knowing making Minds conscious a guide to understanding the phenomenon of Consciousness

and how it relates to the physical brain this book combines biology Neuroscience psychology and artificial intelligence to unlock the secrets of this mysterious ious thing floating around behind our eyeballs one review States deasio is a deep thinker familiar with multiple disciplines and this is as much a work of philosophy as hard science and that readers and it also says that readers will discover rewarding insights so let's get to those insights Dr deasio thank you so much for being here and uh I will see you later for the Q&A thank you Jason thank you very much

for coming and wanting to listen about books and wanting to listen about science so uh here I am uh so Jason provided some pointers onto who I am and uh and to to the book and the book is really I think that the title actually helps locate it uh feeling knowing making Minds conscious uh and what I want is to tell you a little bit about how the book was put together uh why what are my goals uh and then some of the substance of what is in the book and then you can tell me

if I succeeded or not so what the book is uh the book actually comes out of something intriguing uh and that is a request that came first from my editor this is a wonderful editor at Pantheon uh his name was Dan Frank because unfortunately after we were done with the editing Dan got ill uh and died of cancer quite recently so unfortunately he didn't have the chance of seeing the book that he so wanted to see and uh published and the book that he so helped put together and and what Dan Frank asked me is

this he said look you you are have written several books you're constantly writing scientific articles which of course come out of the work as it velops in the laboratory and involves different collaborators and you tell a story with data uh which is not really the most readable thing for a general reader is to be read by other scientists and then I write these or have written these other books right now you know I think six or seven uh and at least five in English uh and these books are sort of longish kinds of books you

know 400 pages and it's not just the number of pages or words it's the fact that uh very often as you try to explain an idea or a result completely uh you want to put all the data because you want people to understand that you're not just pulling you know rabbits out of the Hat you're saying something that you believe in because you did the science to make you believe in that science um so uh things get complic at and it's difficult sometimes for readers to apprehend the main message even if you try to summarize

it and so forth so what then said was well why don't you write a brief book uh a book that instead of 400 would have 200 and some pages uh and why instead of giving all of the facts all of the explanations everything is behind and after you give the essence of the facts and at first I said well I don't know if I can do that but I I thinking about it I said this is actually an interesting challenge at least I can try and uh and I decided that I was going to do

something that I called a high C of Neuroscience so I was going to uh uh take a subject and then chip away everything that I would regard as non essential which is pretty much what happens to begin with in a lot of poetry and certainly happens in Japanese poetry when you think about the idea of a Hau so you're going to chip away the non-essential and come out with the distillation of what it is that you want to tell in this case your reader uh and so that's the book that you're going to uh read

if you want to read it uh and the topics of the book are of course effect the things they have to do with feeling and to some degree with uh motivations and emotions and so forth has to do with mind obviously and has to do with this fundamental property that we all know we have which is the the property the possibility of referring anything that is happening to us to ourselves each and every one of us has a mind we perceive things we think thoughts we listen to music we we we we we have a

particular State we're in and we refer it to ourself we don't think that it belongs to somebody else it doesn't belong to the person next to us it's not with our neighbors it's not even with the people we most love in our lives it is just for us and with us that is the essence of this notion of Consciousness is the relation of whatever it is in our mind to our ourselves now um the business of understanding Consciousness goes a long way uh in fact you can find traces of it throughout the history of philosophy

uh throughout the history of the humanities people have been devoted uh or at least alluded to this problem numerous times and for good reason because this is so important and because it's not immediately apparent how is it that we get this first of of all it's difficult enough to understand how we get a mind to begin with but then this property of the mind to have to be connected with an experience that is very very close to us is really connected to our interior it's connected to us and only us this is you know a

very difficult problem and um up there have been up and downs there have been people that say well it will be understood one day not now because obviously the science still needs to grow and that's a perfectly understandable or was a perfectly understandable attitude because after all if you go back um a hundred years did we know how the brain and our organisms put together language we did not uh did we know how we were able to perceive things in the outside world we were not these are all things that have been happening quite recently

certainly over the past 100 years and in particular over the past 50 years and in some cases over the past couple of decades so we have been able to know more and more about all of these different processes that we take for granted but that in fact permit me to be here using language in this case the English language which is already translating my thoughts which are not in English they're in no language whatsoever they're conceptual they're in the in the language of my cognition and there they are running around and loow and behold I'm

able to translate all this in sentences in the English language I'm giving them to you as I speak and you're doing something which is no less dramatic is that you're listening to this in English and as my words come out in sentences and paragraphs you're translating it into your own language internal language the language of cognition and you could be translating this in some other language for example I I I could be speaking to you in couple of other languages I know and I could be speaking to you for example in in an audience in

in in France or in Spain and and would be doing exactly the same thing that you're doing in this case with this translation from cognition to language to to the English language from the English language back to cognition in your minds so this is all very complicated and beautiful and lo and behold Science Biology in general because that's what we are if we are neuroscientists as biologists and Neuroscience in particular has had this huge success so much so that of course everybody knows that U um stories on Neuroscience whether it is in the daily papers

or in the in other journals are very prominent in in books in which scientists like me talk about what they have achieved uh tend to be read by larger and larger audience so that's all fine so what's so different about Consciousness why why I why are we spending time with Consciousness as a sort of separate problem and the reason is that it is actually a little bit more difficult to conceptualize what's with with Consciousness relative to other things and that's sort of the first approach and then is that there have been a a thinkers and

I'm thinking especially of philosophers that have quite dramatically said that this is not going to be understood anytime soon and in fact some of them have said this is not going to be understood ever period and there there's some of you I'm sure have heard about this expression the hard problem of Consciousness which is not just the hard problem of Consciousness for the philosopher in particular that produced that expression it's the impossible problem of Consciousness and the idea is that well uh we can be very smart we can do all the science but we do

it about all the things that are the easy problems and when it comes to Consciousness we're just going to be spending our time and energy but we're not going to get there well uh I don't think that that's the case I think that there are ways into the problem and so this book with its 48 brief chapters is a sort of first attempt in the direction of making people at least realize that the problem can be uh conceptualized and can be resolved and what I'm going to propose what I have proposed in this book and

I have good news to tell you that after this book was written we have of course continued doing our research because one thing is writing books and others doing the research and the research is already giving a additional results that support what we have found and support before and what we have proposed in this book so uh feeling and knowing making mind's Consciousness is a result of thinking through prior results in Neuroscience uh and I'd like to say in neurobiology because it's a combination of both and also a way of asking questions that go into

the future uh and uh uh I I think it's a it's a beginning of a new Direction and of course some people may disagree some people may say oh well he's trying to to tell you that he's going to solve the problem of conscious but he isn't uh and of course you know we we're open to discussion and the the proof of the pudding as they say is in the eating uh we're probably not going to eat it today uh we're going to come to that conclusion and that decision of whether or not this is

a contribution sometime later after we have time to think back to what I am proposing here um to take away the suspense and make a long story short I am saying as the title implies that the critical issue to understand how Consciousness operates for us humans is actually understanding feeling and in order to make sure that you that you get my point and you will get it of course in the book uh I'm going to have to tell you a little bit about feeling and I'm going to make sure that you understand the distinction between

feeling and other things that sound like feeling such as effect in general or emotion in particular uh unfortunately these words feeling and emotion tend to be confused and uh so here I am saying feeling and knowing feeling leading to Consciousness and some of you may say oh emotion so what like being in fear you know having a state of fear or a state of anger or a state of joy and that leads to Consciousness no that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about a particular class of feelings which is actually the most fundamental in

curiously it's something about which I have written about which we have researched um and it tends to be the neglected part everybody's very attentive to emotions because emotions are so dramatic emotions are about Joy or anger or fear or love uh and people have it every day uh they have feelings too but it's so dramatic that it it calls the attention to itself whereas feelings especially the feelings I'm going to tell you about are more discreet are more quiet they are in the background and what am I talking about I'm talking about feelings such as

hunger which I'm sure you're head at lunch and I hope and you're probably now getting it's later for you it's you know almost dinner time so you're going to be hungry in no time if you're not now uh thirst you probably have thirst several times throughout the day and you have wanted to drink something um you may have felt very well during the day of well-being that's a feeling uh you may have had at some point uh some pain or some discomfort and for example if you have a cold or uh hope not you had

covid you would have had pain and discomfort and feeling sick those are the feelings that talking about Hunger thirst well-being Malay sickness pain uh desire all of these are the fundamental feelings and look at this collection it's a collection of feelings that have to do with the state of our lives and that is the essence and those are the feelings that I'm talking about that are vital for Consciousness so please concentrate on that and just one more thing to help dispel the connection to to emotions feelings are naturally spontaneously about experiences when you say I

have pain when you say I I I I I really state of joy you are reporting an experience that you have and all of those EXP experiences are relative to your own body what you're describing with Hunger thirst or pain or well-being is a state of life within your body that's the critical issue okay now when you are talking about all these feelings you're talking about an experience it's something that is subjective and and let me call your attention to one more thing um people cannot see your feelings people can guess your feelings they can

look at you and say well you you're you're you're not feeling well you you're sick um that's fair enough but that is a guess that people are making about how you look to them how your actions in your body appear to them uh but to you they're perfectly knowable because those feelings are direct experiences in your subjectivity and just one more thing in emotions that's not the case emotions are actions I I like to say that emotions are about theater uh you know we we normally classify a good actor and say that somebody's a good

actor if that actor can give us through the actions actor action emotion the the root word is movement if they convey to you something that is credible and that connects with what you presume is the Mind state of that person in a certain circumstance so emotions are concerts of actions it's theater it's for the outside feelings are subjective our experiences and are in the inside so now you know almost everything that you need to know to go to the next step and the next step is this when you have pain or hunger or thirst or

desire of some kind these experiences are they useful or not to you the answer is obviously they are if you were deprived of having the experience the feeling of hunger or thirst or pain uh you would not be alive for very long you might last couple of days you know with good medical help uh but you would die and if you have for example pain that is caused by trauma or by myocardial inunction uh or by some other disease that you have unless you go to the hospital and you're treated for the causes of that

pain you're out so the answer to my question are feelings useful you bet they are useful you bet your life depends on them and now the next question why is it that they're useful well they're useful because they are conscious because they are naturally spontaneously conscious if they were not conscious you would not know that they existed you would not know that you were in pain or you would not know that you were so well that you could spend your time doing other things rather than taking care of yourself now this is very important and

I'm afraid that people that have dealt with a problem of Consciousness have not concentrated on this issue and they have not paid attention to the fact that feelings are naturally spontaneously conscious so one thing that I like to say and that this book really is trying quietly without screaming telling you is that feelings are the inaugural event of consciousness uh that's important it's a literally an inauguration there was no consciousness before so in evolution everything went on up to the point where organisms were complex enough and had a nervous system and that way they could

produce this Marvel that changed the course of evolution and of history and that is feelings with its consciousness so that's a very important point and as I said this I already revealed a part of the message that I want you to get and that is that you get the appearance of feelings in the long history of evolution once organisms are complex enough and once organisms in the middle of that complexity have developed something quite new which is nervous systems so what I'm saying here and and I want to emphasize this is that I don't think

that organisms that are very simple and that are alive of course but do not have great complexity and do not have nervous systems I don't think those organisms are conscious I do think we are and I do think lots of other species are and that's because of these two things the combination of a certain degree of complexity the presence of a nervous system and the need of that nervous system and that living organism to produce by their combination a way to maintain your life for as long as your genome will allow so those circumstances need

to be met so if you ask me are bacteria conscious I would say no and if you ask me are they stupid no they're not bacteria are actually very intelligent but I put intelligent in quotes because their intelligence is not an intelligence that they know exists they're not aware of how intelligent they are they don't know they're intelligent they don't have a mind to represent their intelligence yet they're being intelligent in a covert way it's s of implicit and we don't see how it's operating of course we now know through the study through the study

of the biological mechanisms we have a little bit of an idea of how the chemistry in those organisms is operating and is making those organisms have smartness but it's not a smartness that they know themselves exist whereas we know for example if we avoid a conflict or if we avoid for example if we vaccinate ourselves and use masks to prevent a disease we're doing something intelligent but we know why we're doing it there's a very good reason for that so um I think that those organisms are a different story they are not conscious take the

example of plants are plants conscious well are they intelligent you bet they are intelligent plants and shrubs and trees all of these living organisms that like us have a birth and life and death uh these organisms go through life showing their intelligence doing things that are quite reasonable and valuable for themselves and to maintain their lives so this is all uh well and good and yet are plants conscious I would say no do they have nervous systems no so they have a lot of complexity they have intelligent behavior and yet I think they don't know

know about that behavior they have no way of representing they have no mind no mental representation of what they're doing right or wrong and generally right so uh this ought to put you in mind that that there different grades and levels that we can find when you look at the marvelous history of biology and you go all the way from creatures that are smart but they don't know they are smart they don't have they have intelligence but they don't have minds they don't have Consciousness they don't have nervous system and then they have creatures that

have nervous systems but probably don't have Minds quite yet and then we have creatures that have nervous systems and are representing their own States and there you have the emergence of feeling which is really the emergence of Consciousness and this is very beautiful and and I think it's a it's a marvelous story and it gives you an entry into the problem of Consciousness why do I think so and I I I don't want to to to Tire you for too long but I want to see if I can get across this idea most of the

Declarations of inability to solve the problem of Consciousness this hard insolvable problem actually come from very thoughtful intelligent capable marvelous call anxiet I respect them very much and I'm actually friends with several of them we just disagree but we have a polite disagreement uh but where where did they get this idea they got this idea because they started out with something as complicated as our vision now of course uh presumably you're looking at me on the screen uh uh and and so it's obviously a Marvel of our visual systems to be able to see on

the screen something that was conveyed uh uh um through the internet and that allows you to get a picture of who I am and to see me here in my study in Los Angeles with books and paintings behind me now that is really a remarkable development of our nervous system this ability to hone in uh on the outside world and either through hearing because you are hearing me in a language even with an accent not that and you are trans translating all that into your thinking so you're making images you're making pictures of all of

this stuff that is in the outside world um and all of this is extremely complex and the people that in the past 50 years uh have been able to show us how the nervous system how our cerebrum uh is capable of doing this have really been remarkable scientists now because of the success people ahead in understanding vision for example or language uh and other aspects of perception such as hearing people have said well this is so complicated so beautiful so so refined that something like Consciousness which must be very refined because it's complicated and beautiful

this must have been also the origin and so where we should be looking for the basis for Consciousness is exactly in this very high level process of our brains which allows us to see and to hear and to uh uh resinate and to have reasoning and creativity and to use languages all of this spectacular complexity that the human brain Clear nearly is delivering and my friends this is where I depart from this strategy and I say no this is wrong and by the way everybody that has tried to do it that way coming from the

top the complexity to understand what Consciousness could be ends up finding that it's not easy it's not possible and that therefore Consciousness must be so mysterious we better think that is outside of our scope and so what I'm trying to do and time will decide if I'm correct or not what I'm trying to do is go the opposite way I'm starting from the simple I'm starting from feeling I'm starting from this as I called it inaugural AB ability of representing the state of life in our body and saying well if this is conscious of necessity

naturally spontaneously and we know it is this is not something to be discussed feelings are conscious okay that at that point we can all agree then my reasoning is when you think about how feelings were put together they're not being put together by having an extremely sophisticated organ of perception like our ratina they're being created by a marriage of the nervous system that uh that is of course in our our brains and the way in which that nervous system can probe the state of our body everywhere in that entire body so what we have here

is point number one feeling is dependent not on appreciating what's in the outside world but what's but on appreciating what is inside our own organism and so here you get something very bizarre you have the nervous system appreciating what is inside the organism where that nervous system also is so we have a possibility of interaction so that the nervous system can look into the body in every nuk and cranny of the body and that every nuk and cran of the body can talk back to the nervous system this is completely different from what happens with

the outside world the outside world is out there fine and Dy but it doesn't come into my body it I get representations of it in my retina or in my ears but I do not allow the outside world to enter my body however I perfectly allow my body to be entered by every aspect of nerves that comes from our brain and it distributes itself in every little bit of skin and arterials and arteries and musle muscles and viscera like the heart or or or the line or the gut so in the in our organisms we

have a remarkable different mechanism to make feelings from the mechanism with which we make perceptions of the outside world conclusion first feelings are not Perceptions in the typical uh sense of the term feelings are conversation dialogues between the nervous system and the body and they have a back and forth so they are really a comingling of the two and this is very different from my looking out at the scenery outside my windows the scener is there I'm not interfering with the mountains or the trees or the buildings they're there I'm here and this is a

distance it's a t sense okay as much Tor as you are having SE me on some screen uh and and I'm here and you know it's it's it's very far away you're not interacting with me physically feeling different story there's that full interaction and then the last point is that it's out of that interaction and out of the way the nervous system is put together for the purposes of interception which is this ability to investigate the interior it's out of that particular nature of that nervous system that we get our feelings and that is really

quite distinct and we know now and this is where science comes in and helps the argument um we know now that that nervous system is simpler that that nervous system is not as modern and well insulated as for example the visual auditory system and that literally this idea that you might say it's a bit romantic this idea of nerve stocking to the gut well this is not romance this is something that is happening because we know that the nerves are immediately vulnerable to molecules that are in the surround and that they can actually be a

cross conversation between body quote unquote and brain on the other side so this is the essence of what I want to express in the and uh the the gives you a sort of entry into into this thinking and I hope if you're interested in this topic that you go and read the rest uh because you'll learn more and uh and as I said time will tell I hope I'm right of course who doesn't uh and I have a suspicion that I am sorry to be to be a little bit uh conceited but um I better

be conceited since I'm just finish the book right so thank you very much for your attention um and for your patience and if Jason wants to come back and ask me questions I'm here here we are thank you very much for that that was uh that that was fascinating um if if people don't mind I actually I I was reading a bit of the book and I'm sure it's something that people have asked you about um and I'm I'm sure you've been writing it a while but there is uh the embarrassment of viruses you talk

about and you say something um how to classify viruses and understand their role in the general economy of Life are viruses alive no and I know you were speaking about um bacteria to a certain degree and I just wonder not that not that the pandemic or the Corona virus is complicated necessarily your thinking about this notion but has it complicated the way other people approach your discipline from from outside it or or you know maybe even others within um how people are looking at that yeah it's a very very good point it's very timely clearly

by the way when I wrote that I we were not yet in in covid so it it intercedes it but I my preoccupation uh as I laid out this book uh in my previous book also called The Strange order of things it's the it's the fact that you have all of these manifestations of our very rich biology and you need to know what's what in order to make sense of what these different organisms can or cannot do and so in the case of bacteria you have really living forms that are very simple and that don't

have a nervous system but but are alive in the proper sense with viruses it's different because virus are not quite alive in the proper sense they have nucleic acids and they can do a lot of harm as we know from all the terrible diseases that they constantly create including covid but they are not of the same level so in fact when we uh very in a very colloquial way say we need to kill those viruses we don't you cannot kill a thing that is not alive but they are there and they are component of what

constitutes life uh and they can do a lot of harm once they uh enter cells and basically they're entering cells and being being uh unwelcome guests because they not being alive don't have the conditions to maintain their own status so they need to be parasitic of other uh organisms quote unquote so that's that's the the whole story and then it's nice to be able to contrast this with complicated creatures whether we're talking about simple fly or a dog or or a creature like we are uh thank you um so this question is from Theodore uh

he asks emo he says he's an em emotion researchers yeah emotion researchers use different definitions of the word emotion what is your definition of emotion my definition of emotion is a collection of actions that uh represents a particular state of the organism uh and that translates for the outside world something about the state of the organ so let's give the example of the emotion fear um when you are in fear there some some threat some somebody's attacking you and what happens is that you have a collection of actions for example you require if you're being

you're under attack you sort of pull yourself back very often your eyes open up your mouth can open uh uh and there are actions that are also being happening in the inside like for example there's a contraction of arteries there's an acceleration of heart rate uh there's a contraction of the gut there all sorts of actions always actions that are happening in your organism and that are uh triggered by the presence of that stimulus with POS the threat to you and what's very interesting is that as a result of all of these actions you're also

going to feel fear so not only do you act fear for the outside world but you are in fear as an experience and so the best definition that I can give you of emotion is a collection of actions that has been through Evolution and in different species created a sort of pattern that allows um the the that creature to respond more effectively and that also allows other creatures to recognize the state that that particular creature is in so it goes both ways you you you you alter you affect yourself because you're in being threatened and

you also betray that that fear that concern resulting from the threat to the outside world and then you feel accordingly but but that feeling that you have is secondary to the actions that have happened in your body whereas hunger or thirst thirst uh or uh um sexual attraction those are feelings that are consequent to actions that happen in the inside and that are being expressed mentally for you and that only you know about and of course of course if you are heads over Hills in love you will also look like you are hands of in

love but that's you you could actually mask it you you might not betrayed to the outside world whereas if you are terrified uh it's very difficult to to not show that to the outside world you're going to have something that automatically happens in your facial expressions that makes people know that you are afraid okay but you can be you can be very hungry and and not show that you're hungry you could be very polite to your to the people who invited you for dinner instead of saying where's dinner I want to eat you just stay

there waiting calmly until you serve dinner uh Francisco who sends his admiration from buenos Ares says I'm very grateful for this opportunity uh I read the book and I'd like to ask if we could relate the three distinct this might be a professional question uh uh if we could relate the three distinct and consecutive evolutionary stages those being be being feeling knowing that are presented with uh that are presented with Charles Sanders Pierce's ideas about Triads feeling and cognition thank you very much Ah that's a beautiful question first of all Hello to buen Osirus that's

great I didn't know that you people in Philadelphia go far and wide my God I thought you wide you're you're amazing um so um it's very interesting I'm gonna give you a very honest answer I read Charles Pur early in my life uh thanks to the influence of one of my mentors uh and uh I read I thought it was extremely complicated and I will confess to you that I've never gone back to Mr purse so to give you an honest answer and an informed answer I would have to review that I have a suspicion

just from the way you asked me the question and from what I remember that probably there could be a considerable uh um connection um but I'm going to make a note here and I'm gonna have to go to him and I thank you and uh maybe I can when I have the answer I'll write to Jason Jason writes to you thank you uh this this question is from Rick he he asks why were feelings previously ignored in the discussion of Consciousness that's a splendid question okay uh the the fo why I don't know if I

can I can say it but I I have several I have several candidates first feelings as we have just seen are interior private events um there's been a long tradition in the history of Science and even in the history of philosophy of trying to if not ignore to minimize the importance of effect uh in fact the one of the first after my my research God more and more oriented towards things that had to do with effect I wrote a book that is quite welln called deart and deart is all about this this issue it's the

issue that states of effect feelings and emotions were neglected in the history of Science and and this continues to be the case uh although today there's far more of an acknowledgment that feelings are important and that emotions are important because clearly people suffer people have pains people have Joys and people recognize that the world of effect is a very primary world and that a lot of the things that happen in the world of reasoning and creativity are in fact dependent on what state you're in in terms of eff so there's some people that still look

a scans at feeling uh but fortunately in the general culture that's been diminishing within the world of science uh clearly the the the the the power has been on the side of the people who study cognition in general and I don't have any problem with that that you know we need to understand how we think we need to understand how we reason uh we need to understand languages we need to understand perception uh in know its details so that's perfectly reasonable to do but we should not neglect effect and I think more and more you

know I I very often have the impression suddenly when I was at the beginning of my career the impression was of condescension so people would say oh well damasi wants to talk about emotions let the poor man talk about emotions because that's that's his interest uh and there was not an acknowledgement that that would be sort of equal player um and and now that has changed and people are much more open to to see that this is important now that is going to play a role in the reaction that people have about for these ideas

because by trying to link Consciousness which has been sort of the Pinnacle of cognitivism to uh feeling which is this bottom stage process um I I think that that's going to be a little bit difficult for some people to stomach although so far the reaction that I've had uh is exactly the opposite people have been extremely welcoming to the idea even when they don't think it will work they say well maybe we should just listen to it and and let's play it out let's see what what the data tell you because in the end it's

not going to be that this is not a a beauty contest this is about where the facts are and if the facts are in support of feeling that's what it is but as the uh as the person was the question uh uh knows very well feelings were not in fashion and now they are a bit more thank you uh here let's get very specific in this one I'm jumping around a bit so I'm GNA try and get to as many folks as I can um is there evidence that jellyfish or worms experience hunger and I

suppose taking that a little broader how you know how do we know that organisms that quote unquote simpler organisms such as jellyfish wor stuff like that experience things like this right okay that's absolutely excellent question um here's here's what I would do I would suggest as a test this is something actually is one of the interests of our lab of our in Institute sort of mapping out what could and could not experience feelings in terms of its status biologically so first you need to have a certain degree of complexity in an organism second you need

to have a nervous system then if you especially ask something specific like hunger or thirst um you need to to have a a a way a system that is in charge of dig for example and that has to be sufficiently defined that there could be something like feeling about it uh that would have the recognition of what was wrong in that system although the recognition could come out of a simple molecular mechanism it doesn't need to be uh say a stomach uh making noises and Contracting or a gut it can be the balance of molecules

at a particular part but I'm my inclination is to be as liberal as possible on the way down so I'm ready to think that very simple organisms um for example flies um animals that have actually a very small but very complex nerv system will have feelings that will be somewhat similar to our feelings uh I I don't have any problem with that so the same way that I am I'm I'm I'm quite uh um quite negative in relation to the possibilities of plans um not that I don't respect them on the contrary um and I

am very negative in relation to the possibility of artificial intelligence ever coming up with feelings like our feelings because in order to make a robot feel the way we do we that we need to First make the robot alive and if the robot is alive then we don't have any problem so it's it's an absurd situation we can make however a robot do things that are similar to the things that are in emotions and have states that are somewhat similar to the physiology of feelings but it doesn't mean that they would feel because that's absurd

but I'm very I'm very open to a lot of small organisms and certainly and I think this is very important it's quite important to believe because this I think is sound science that a lot of the living organisms that are not human and are around us are in fact feeling creatures uh and it's not just domestic animals but also the animals that are out in the fields and the animals that are out in the sea um and the likelihood that they would not have feelings is actually as far as I'm concern very low do they

feel exactly like us probably not they don't have Minds as rich as ours but they have feelings I think and if they have feelings so we have emotions too in relation for example if they are in pain if you attack one of those animals and they clearly must be in pain predictably and the way they look the way they they seem to behave for us is the way in which there quite a lot of similarity to what we do they appear to be suffering well if they appear to be suffering why not be generous and

presume they're suffering and I think this is very very important in terms of the way we behave in relation to animals around us it's a very it's a point that is a very sore one because people have been very open and careless about how they treat animals except if they love them and they think the animals love them they think the animal loves them how could the animal not have feelings okay so um the we need to take this these problems very very seriously and and very up front um actually I think you even answered

a couple of our other questions there do dogs have Consciousness how if so how do we let yeah so there we go uh that was from Marsha and uh I don't want to mispronounce the name Burke uh said what is the most primitive organ organism that we can clearly attribute some Consciousness too you were think you address that pretty well um so there's an there's a question here that says briefly can you give us an idea of what types of research um perhaps even outside of this you know specific field support your understanding of Consciousness

or or within as well okay so the several types of research I'll tell you about the one that we are practicing in the the one that is very important to us which is to understand at the micro level the physiology of Fe so what is it when you have a an organism uh what is what is it that happens for example in a nerve trunk uh what happens for example we know that there nerves that will say come out of Y leg and will go into a spinal ganglion next to your spinal cord and that

that nerve needs to make contact with the ganglion and the ganglion then sends messages into the spinal cord and then up the spinal cord into nuclei in the brain stem in the brain we now can make a can make this Anatomy clear and we need to know more about the physiological phenomena within that Anatomy what's really happening at those synapses or for example is there are there signals that are being presented to the nerves outside of synaptic contacts in the middle of the Exxon for example which we think there are are there parts of the

organism that are non neural that are making that are having an influence on the neural parts which again we have evidence is the case because in spinal ganglia there's a lack of blood brain barrier see for example our brain our cereum is completely uh surrounded by this this particular set of membranes that is called the blood brain barrier and what this means is that the bloodstream with all of the stuff that is csing in the bloodstream all the chemistries that are there is not going to impinge on the brain directly because that would be a

big mess you would you would have chemical influences on the neurons and we don't want that we want to preserve that territory it's like having a border uh now that big blood brain barrier lo and behold is lacking on the the ganglia that go into the nervous system now that is very interesting because it's saying to us well there you are remember how I mentioned the this marriage of body and brain this marriage of nervous system and our flesh and and that would be an indication there is an indication that that marriage does occur but

we know this in these general terms we need to know more about the detail and what happens to the firing of neurons and so forth so that's the for me the most important Avenue to sort of try to make the point there's one other which is very interesting is that people that are studying how simple organisms operate uh and how the nervous systems of those organisms operate have a very remarkable possibility of understanding the relationships of those simple nervous systems to the structure of those organisms and for example there's some indication that the the the

one very important point of entry uh into the nervous system happens to be organs of an organism that are related to important things such as for example digestion feeding and digestion uh which nobody can say is not important because if people don't go and have dinner at some point they're going to be in trouble so that's the reason reason why feelings of hunger work and that's the reason why this has to do with Consciousness and time will tell how right uh this this hypothesis will turn out to be okay well we are about at time

but I just wanted so you had a person who asked several questions several comments and just I think just wanted to say TC Ravens says thank you your books have enriched my life and view of the world uh so just wanted to get to that and uh thank you get that across and yeah and so too with all of us so I just wanted to thank you on behalf of myself the library our viewing audience for uh joining us tonight and um hope everybody goes out and gets feeling and knowing making Minds conscious and Professor

Deasia thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you it was my pleasure and thank you to you and thank for the questions they were very interesting all right good night everybody thank you again good night good night thank you