Wiki Page, Test Course: Damasio on consciousness (1994)

Wiki Page
2014-06-30T22:46:00-06:00

"At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless some- thing goes wrong with the remaking. The background feeling now, or the feeling of an emotion now, along with the non-body sensory signals now, happen to the concept of self as instantiated in the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. But our self, or better even, our metaself, only ‘learns’ about that ‘now’ an instant later. ... Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning the future, which we do on the stepping-stones of the past. The present is never here. We are hopelessly late for consciousness."

Damasio AR (1994) Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam, New York