Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio (2023), Neural Computation 35(3):277–286 — DOI 10.1162/neco_a_01521
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request for “some Antonio Damasio”.
Deferred because the full text could not be reached, so no NOTE is
filed. What the abstract says, to scope it until somebody reads it:
- What consciousness is. It “occurs when mind contents, such as perceptions and thoughts, are spontaneously identified as belonging to a specific organism/owner”. The hypothesis is that “a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings” provides that identification.
- Two kinds of homeostatic feeling. Some report salient fluctuations (hunger, pain, well-being, malaise). Others, close to metabolic equilibrium, are “feelings of life/existence”, such as breathing or body temperature.
- Evolution. Homeostatic feelings “were the inaugural phenomena of consciousness”, selected because the knowledge they carry gave “overt” guidance to life regulation, where nonconscious organisms have only covert regulation.
- Mechanism. Feelings come from a two-way interaction between interoceptive parts of the nervous system and non-neural parts of the body: viscera and the chemical molecules in their operation. They are “continuous and hybrid phenomena”, at once neural/representational/mental and nonneural/visceral/chemical.
- The mind-body problem. The authors say this “offers a solution”: homeostatic feelings “constitute the ‘mental’ version of bodily processes”.
A reading should check what evidence the paper gives for the identification claim and for the bidirectional mechanism, and whether the mind-body claim is argued or only stated.
Not the work NOTE-120 cites. NOTE-120 reports Terrill and colleagues’ plant paper (LIT-193), which counts “Damasio & Damasio, 2023” among the critics who find the analogy between animal nervous systems and plant vascular systems misleading. Terrill and colleagues’ reference list identifies that work as “Sensing is a far cry from sentience”, Animal Sentience 33(16), DOI 10.51291/2377-7478.1805, a commentary, not this paper. NOTE-120 reports Terrill and colleagues’ first use of the citation correctly. It leaves out their second, on p. 7, that plant sensing and the loss of sensory responses under anaesthesia may say nothing about sentience, “so behavioral evidence may fall flat”. The commentary is not held here.
How it bears on what the record holds:
- It is the later and more ambitious form of the account in Damasio and Carvalho (LIT-388), which already said that the advent of feeling was the advent of mind. This paper makes feeling the source of consciousness and adds the hybrid neural-visceral mechanism.
- It is a rival, within biological approaches, to Seth’s biological naturalism (LIT-135). Both tie consciousness to the regulation of a living body through interoception. Seth argues through predictive processing and the free energy principle; by its abstract this paper argues through homeostatic feeling and a body-brain loop.
- Its claim that consciousness is the identification of mind contents with an owner is a claim about the self. It bears on the record’s arguments about whether machines could be conscious (Birch’s centrist manifesto, LIT-111; Seth, LIT-135) only by implication, since an organism with viscera is part of its mechanism.