A. Damasio, "Self Comes to Mind" 에서

Antonio Damasio, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" (2010)

 

 

독후감을 쓰는 법은 없지만 어떤 책은 읽고나서 본문에서 그냥 몇

줄 인용하는 포스트를 일종의 메모로 여기 남기는데, 당연히 있을

Antonio Damasio, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the

Conscious Mind" (2010) 에 대한 포스트는 없고, 오히려, 이 책이

인상적이었던 때문에 읽게 된 저자의 최근 저서에 대한 포스트는

있다: "The Strange Order of Things" (2018)

 

아래는 "Self Comes to Mind"에서의 인용이다.

 

This book is dedicated to addressing two questions. First: how

does the brain construct a mind? Second: how does the brain

makes the mind conscious? (p 6)

 

The aspects of self thatpermits us to formulate interpretations

about our existence and about the world are still evolving,

certainly at the cultural level and, in all likely, at the biological

level as well. (p13)

 

Subjectivity is not required for mental state to exist, only for

them to be privately known. (p 17)

 

Minds emerge when the activity of small circuits is organized

across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns....

[T]he brain maps the world arount it[those representational

patterns] and maps its own doings. (p 19)

 

[T]he body is a foundation of the conscious mind.... [T]he

most stable aspects of body functions are represented in the

brain, in the form of maps, thereby contributing images to

the mind.... [T]he special kind of mental images of the body

produced in body-mapping structures constitutes the

protoself, which foreshadows the self to be.... [T]he critical

body-mapping and image-making structures are located

below the level of the cerebral cortex, in ... the upper brain

stem. (p 21-22)

 

I hypothesize that the first and most elementary product of the

protoself is primordial feelings, which occur spontaneously and

continuously whenever one is awake.  They provide a direct

experience of one's own living body ... conncted to nothing but

sheer existence. (p 22)

 

Brins begin building conscious minds not at the level of the

cerebral cortex but rather at the level of the brain stem. (P 23)

 

The self is built in distinct steps grounded on the protoself.

The first step is the generation of primordial feelings.... Next is

the core self. The core self is about action -- specifically, about

a relationship between the organism and the object.... Finally,

there is the autobiographical self. This self is defined in terms

of biographical knowledge pertaining to the past as well as the

anticipated future.... The protoself ... and the core self

constutute a "material me." The autobiographical self ...

constitute a "social me" and a "spiritual me." (p 24)

 

Both basic homeostasis ... and sociocultural homeostasis (which

is created and guided by reflective conscious minds) operate as

curators of biological value. (p 28)

 

There is growing evidence that, over multiple generations,

cultural developments leads to change in the genome.... 

Consciousness came into being because of biological value, as

a contributer to more effective value management. (p 29)

 

I know it is difficult to imagine that the notions of "desire" and

"will" are applicable to a single lonely cell.... But there they are,

by whatever name you may wish to call those features of the

cell's behavior. (p 37)

 

To explain why neurons are special.... The essential functional

difference has to do with the neuron's ability to produce

electrochemical signals capable of changing the state of other

cells. (p 40)

 

[N]eurons are about the body, and this "aboutness"... is the

defining trait of neurons, neuron circuits, and brains. I believe

this aboutness is the reason why the covert will to live of the

cells in our body could ever have been translated into a

minded, conscious will. (p41)

 

One other distinction must be made between neurons and

other body cells. To the best of our knowledge, neurons do not

reproduce -- that is, they do not devide. Nor do they regenerate,

or at least not to a significant extent. (p 43)

 

Knowing, as opposed to being and doing, was a critical break.

(p 187)

 

Mind is most natural result of evolution, and it is largely

nonconscious, internal, and unrevealed. it comes to be known

thanks to the narrow window of consciousness.... Consciousness

offers a direct experience of mind, but the broker of the

experience is a self, which is an inrternal and imperfectly

constructed informer rather than an external, reliable observer.

(p 188)

 

Building a Conscious Mind

 

The hypothesis comes in two parts. the first specifies that the

brain constructs consciousness by generating a self process

within an awake mind. The essence of the self is a focusing of

the mind on the material organism that it inhabits.... The second

part ... proposes that the self is built in stages. The simplest

stage emerges from the part of the brain that stands for the

organism (the protoself) and consists of a gathering of  images

that describe relatively stable aspects of the body and generrate

spontaneous feelings of the living body (primordial feelings).

The second stage results from establishing a relationship

between the organism (as represented by the protoself) and any

part of brain that representss an object-to-be-known. The result

is the core self. The third stage allows multiple objects,

previously recorded as lived experience or as anticipated future,

to interact with the protoself and produce an abundance of core

self pulses. The result is the autobiographical self. All these stges

are constructed in separate but coordinated brain work spaces.

These are the image spaces, the playground for the influence of

both ongoing perception and of dispositions contained in

convergence-divergence regions. (p 191-192)

 

Later in evolution more complex levels of self -- core self and

beyond -- began to genrate subjectivity within the mind and to

qualify for consciousness.... Consciousness in the full sense of the

term emerged after such knowledge was categorized, symbolized

in varied forms (including recursive language), and manipulated

by imagination and reason. (p193)

 

To a considerable extent, the immense cognitive complexity that

hallmarks the current conscious minds of humans is motivated

and archestrated by the self, as a proxy of value. (p 194)

 

The contributors to the protoself include master interoceptive

maps, master organism maps, and maps of the externally

directed sensory maps. (p 201)

 

[I]nteroception is a suitable source for the relative invariance

required to establish some sort of stable scaffolding for what

will eventually constitute the self. (p 205)

 

Mental states have been linked to the firing rates of neurons

and to the synchronization of neuron circuits by oscillatory

activity. (p 257)

 

[W]hat we need to explain is why conscious states appear to us

the way they do, even if the appearance is misleading. (p 257)