Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness

Science and Technology
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This doesn’t belong under Humanism, what one does with this information probably could, I’ll admit,
still seems to me it deserves being posted here, hope it stays put.
To me Dr. Damasio presents a wonderful description of what modern science has to tell us about the inner workings of ourselves.
Sure, it does’t approach the grand philosophical question of determinism/free will, instead it offers an objective description of how the body/brain/word interacts - and hints at our abilities at substantively influencing events, or as some would say
to exercise our free will in a ridged reality.

Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness TED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMrzdk_YnYY Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness -- that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self
4:40 1) a mind, which is a flow of mental images 2) a self a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it a self introduces a subjective perspective in the mind we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind 4:55 We need to know: 1) how minds are put together, and 2) how selves are constructed 9:35 What about the self? "We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all the other maps." the self needs the body its reference point our internal milieu management of bodily systems need to keep it within narrow range of 'sameness' 13:45 schematic of connections between brain's components 14:00 "you generate the map of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings, primordial feelings by the way" 16:05 three levels of self: proto self core self autobiographical self The autobiographical self is the lived past and the anticipated future 16:45 The autobiographical self has prompted: extended memory reasoning imagination creativity language 16:55 Out of that we get - The instruments of culture: religions justice trade the arts science technology 17:15 "And here is the novelty - something that is not entirely set by our biology it is developed in the cultures, it is developed in collectives of human beings. This is of course the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation" Finally, Why care? curiosity understanding of society and culture medicine
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hmmm I’m starting to think that perhaps philosophy doesn’t have room for this sort of stuff?
perhaps that’s why it seems so discombobulated to me. :blank: