Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. A member of the National Academy of Medicine, Damasio has pioneered research into the neural mechanisms of decision-making, emotion, feelings, and the physiological basis of the self.
Through clinical studies of neurological patients with focal brain damage, Damasio formulated the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, demonstrating that rationality and decision-making depend fundamentally on emotional signals rooted in bodily states. In The Feeling of What Happens (1999) and Feeling & Knowing (2021), he stratified consciousness into proto-self (unconscious bodily monitoring), core consciousness (the feeling of knowing that occurs when an object alters the organism), and extended consciousness (autobiographical memory and complex cognition).
Damasio’s work establishes that subjective experience is inseparable from the continuous homeostatic imperative to maintain biological viability. For artificial systems, this implies that disembodied neural networks lacking internal physiological vulnerability and homeostatic regulation can simulate intelligent reasoning without possessing genuine subjective feelings or conscious selfhood.
Known for. Somatic Marker Hypothesis, neurobiology of emotion and feeling, homeostasis, Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Self Comes to Mind (2010)
Coverage on this site
- Antonio Damasio Somatic Markers Affective Consciousness and What the Body Requires of AI August 2026
Elsewhere
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.