Damasio's self theory
Explanation
Antonio Damasio, Portuguese-American neurologist, has developed in works such as Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999) and The Strange Order of Things (2018) a distinctive theory of self and consciousness centred on the body and emotion. His thesis: the self is not a product of rational cognition but of deep, evolutionarily ancient bodily-affective processes.
Damasio distinguishes three levels of self. First, the proto-self: automatic representations of the body's internal state (homeostasis, visceral senses) occurring in subcortical structures such as the brainstem and hypothalamus. It is preconscious and shared with many vertebrates. Second, the core self: the moment-by-moment sense of being a subject experiencing things, generated by the interaction between the proto-self and perceptual objects.
Third, the autobiographical self: the narrative of the self extended in time, with biography, plans, social identity. This level requires autobiographical memory and language, and is most developed in humans. But it is secondary in relation to the lower levels: if the proto-self or core self fail, the autobiographical self disintegrates.
Damasio repeatedly stresses the centrality of emotion and body. Human consciousness is not pure disembodied reason; it is always affective and bodily. His patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (studies of Phineas Gage and others) have intact reasoning but are incapable of making sensible decisions because they have lost the emotional-bodily basis of judgement.
His somatic marker theory proposes that rational decisions rely on subtle bodily sensations (a knot in the stomach, a tension, a warm feeling) that encode previous experiences. Without access to these markers, deliberation becomes interminable and ineffective. Reason without emotion is not more rational, it is dysfunctional.
Damasio's work has had enormous impact in neuroscience, philosophy, behavioural economics and education. His emphasis on the affective-bodily-homeostatic as the basis of mind connects with embodied cognition, polyvagal theories (Stephen Porges) and contemporary approaches to interoception. It is an important corrective to the intellectualist and disembodied views of consciousness inherited from Cartesianism.
Strengths
- A detailed neurobiological theory of the self.
- Integrates emotion, body and consciousness.
- Empirical support (neurological patients).
- Useful stratification (proto/core/autobiographical).
Main critiques
- Insufficiently specific about the hard problem.
- Some distinctions hard to operationalise.
- Critique from pure functionalism.
- Tension between embodiment and specific neural localisation.