Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio

I bought this book after hearing the author interviewed by Michael Shermer on a podcast. I listened to the podcast because I had recently been asked to preach a guest sermon for the Unitarian Universalists of the Santa Clarita Valley and for a topic I was inspired by an article I read in the New York Times about meetings that executives at the Anthropic company had been convening with groups of religious thinkers to talk about the moral implications of artificial intelligence. The concerns included the obvious one about how to instill a moral sense into artificial intelligence agents (so they don’t kill us) but also the less obvious questions of whether it was possible that artificial intelligence agents might be, or eventually could become, conscious and if they did, did we not then have a moral obligation to care for and protect them?

Mentioning to my husband that I was thinking about these questions, he recommended that we listen to this podcast which was exactly about the nature of consciousness and incidentally the question of whether artificial intelligence might be conscious. I enjoyed the podcast, found it relevant to what I was thinking about, and bought the book. My sermon, preached on November 22, 2026, is here.

Damasio was a charming and clear-spoken thinker. His writing is equally clear. The book is divided into numerous short chapters, which makes his ideas easily digestible. Still, though the book is short, it took me some time to read. He frequently summarizes what he has already explained so there’s no fear of getting lost in his argument. And his thesis is persuasive, though I found it incomplete.

Damasio’s proposition is that the origin of consciousness can be found in a living organism’s imperative to maintain homeostasis, that is, to regulate itself within its environment within certain narrow bands necessary for preserving its life: the right amount of oxygen, the right amount of water, the right temperature, etc. Lower forms of life, such as bacteria and all plants, maintain homeostasis through unconscious means having to do with inherent structures and automatic chemical reactions. When a tree needs water if takes in available water (if there is any). It doesn’t know it needs water. And it doesn’t feel thirst. A tree simply does its tree things. Roots access ambient water, leaves turn toward the sun, and so on, entirely unaware, of the outside world or its internal conditions.

Consciousness developed in animal life due to its advantages in enabling the organism to take an active, deliberate, part in meeting its homeostatic needs. Key to this advantage, according to Damasio, who is a neuroscientist as a well as a philosopher, is the development of a nervous system. The nervous system creates a communication pathway throughout the organism connecting to a central coordinating organ: a brain, that allows status messages to be instantaneously felt by an organism that now has a sense of self. It is this sense of a self existing that defines what we mean by consciousness: “I am”. And it is the nervous system sending needful messages such as “I’m thirsty” or “I’m dangerously hot” that creates those feelings of existence. In many cases the body attends to its needs without conscious involvement. In other cases the body signals “do something!” and the brain marshalls the body to find water, take a drink, get out of the sun, or what have you.

Damasio’s theory is that consciousness begins at this low level of feeling: pain, thirst, hunger, heat and cold. Once the consciousness capability is in place, the organism then uses it to process information received from the outward-facing organs: eyes and ears and so on, to create a mental picture of the outside world. Memories of previous experiences, “I’ve felt this pain before” or “I’ve seen tigers before” allow us to reflect on our immediate sensations and take strategic life-preserving actions. Damasio’s insight is that the higher levels of consciousness: reflection and language, religion, philosophy, art, neuroscience, are built up from a base level of feelings: hunger, thirst, pain and a sense of bodily autonomy “I am” “This is me.” Without that base level the higher structures of cognition and abstract thinking cannot exist. Thus his conclusion, vis a vis artificial intelligence, is that artificial intelligence agents can mimic consciousness, but lacking nervous systems or a sense of self cannot actually be conscious.

Makes sense to me. My fault with the book, though somewhat beyond the scope of the book, is the way that Damasio elides the so called “hard problem” of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness arises from the difference in kind between the physical stuff of bodies and brains and neurons and the immaterial stuff of minds: thoughts and memories and intentions, and so on. How does a brain create a mind? No amount of increasing complexity in physical matter accounts for the sudden leap to immaterial mentality. Damasio considers the hard problem a red herring owing to the ignorance of early scientists about the clear, pervasive, overwhelmingly demonstrative connection between the physical structures of nervous system, brain stem, and brain, and the resulting mental affects. Not realizing that connection, early thinkers saw physical body and immaterial brain as two different things. Now that we have proved how connected they are, Damasio says, we needn’t make the error of disconnecting them.

But that explains away, without really explaining. The connection between brain and mind is evident, but the how by which one leads to the other is still unresolved. I’m not convinced that simply claiming the problem shouldn’t be a problem really solves the problem!

The best answer I’m aware of comes from the process thought I encountered in seminary. Damasio makes no mention of this in his book and cites no process thinkers in his extensive bibliography. There are much better process thinkers than me, but in short, the process thought answer to the hard problem is to begin with a conception of the basic building blocks of nature not as material objects: atoms and their smaller, but still conceived as physical, components, but to imagine the basic stuff as time-delineated energetic events. (I believe quantum physics affirms this view.) As these events come into being, become for a moment, and end, they embody experience. As these time-delineated energetic events interact and combine and grow in complexity, so too does the experience aggregate. Thus a sense of being and becoming is contained in the basic structure of existence. Consciousness isn’t suddenly imposed onto blind material at some later date. The seeds of consciousness (i.e. being, becoming, experience) are included from the foundation. Consciousness itself, meaning the high-level self-aware feeling of existence, as Damasio defines it, may not emerge until organisms with nervous systems and brains develop, but the proto-consciousness was already existent.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.