Feelings are at the origin of consciousness, says neuroscientist

Portuguese neuroscientist António Damásio has some not very encouraging news for anyone who dreams of creating electronic brains with some form of consciousness, similar to that of human beings: this type of plan will probably not work.

“Paradoxically, what it would take for artificial intelligence to be more like ours is vulnerability. Computers work extremely robustly. They are not vulnerable like us, who are little angels at the mercy of what the world gives us”, he jokes. he.

But it was precisely this relative fragility of living entities that produced a nervous system capable of boosting the emergence of feelings and the ability to learn. These are the traits that characterize the consciousness of our species and, most likely, that of other animals as well.

Damásio, 78, details the arguments on the subject in his most recent book, “Sentir e Saber: The Origins of Consciousness”, which has just arrived in Brazil. At first glance, the less than 200 pages of the work may seem like little to tackle a subject surrounded by such an aura of mystery, but the researcher at the University of Southern California (United States) says that brevity, in these cases, is a virtue. .

“When talking about extremely complicated problems, it is necessary to decide what is essential and define a clear order for what you are going to explain. And for many readers, it’s no use spending hundreds of pages on this. I tried to create very small chapters, almost poetic, that could give an idea of ​​the immensity of the problems that we face”, he summarized in conversation with the Sheet by videoconferencing.

“Very little is lost with this type of exercise – we are usually just leaving out the details.”

Tracing the path that led to the emergence of self-aware brains involves, first of all, reasoning based on the theory of evolution and, therefore, an effort to avoid the human mania of placing itself at the top of the podium of living beings, says the neuroscientist.

Damasio is keen to point out that even bacteria and plants possess sophisticated forms of intelligence, which are implicit and do not involve the appearance of a mind, but still allow them to capture what is happening in the environment around them and face the challenges present in it. .

He highlights the intriguing fact that certain anesthetics also have an effect on vegetables, even though plants do not have a nervous system or feel pain. “This has to do with the fact that these anesthetics work at a much deeper biological level than consciousness,” he explains.

“Living creatures like plants are capable of ‘sensing,’ as we say in English, which is different from consciously sensing. They respond to temperature, humidity and soil nutrients, but they don’t have to mentally represent all of that.”

At a given moment in the evolution of living beings with many cells, natural selection led some to adopt the strategy of “sensing” without feelings (as is the case with plants and fungi), while others, the ancestors of animals, began to develop systems nerves and the ability to have feelings and emotions. For Damasio, it is this capacity, and not typically human rationality, that is primarily responsible for the emergence of consciousness.

“Feelings are the organism’s way of informing ourselves that we are alive and that we need to save our own. Feelings of pain, hunger, well-being or discomfort are directly informing us about the conditions of the our existence and allow us to make decisions about our lives,” he says. This is one of the reasons behind the failure to create human-like artificial intelligences: without feelings and emotions, consciousness is unlikely to emerge.

For Damasio, this evolutionary trajectory of conscious brains makes it clear that there is a lot of continuity between human and animal consciousness.

“One thing I’ve started to pay special attention to is the intimate connection between consciousness and feeling, and one of the deepest and most important is pain,” he says.

“We know that, just as we have pain, the animals around us evidently have something very similar or even the same. We need to think twice, and think about this similarity, before giving us the authority to induce this kind of thing in other living beings.”