A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.
We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence – yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It’s this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.
I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
The problem that we, as living organisms, face – and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces – is the management of life.
Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.
There are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in the brain to exactly the same stimulus and there could be differences there.
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
I got interested in the emotions after studying patients who had lost the ability to emote and feel under certain circumstances. Many of those patients also had major impairments in their ability to make decisions.
I think it’s possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.