I thought you might be interested to see philosopher Ned Block’s review of Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind in The New York Times, along with Siri Hustvedt’s response.
Did they read the same book?
Links
- Alva Noë: "Why Is Consciousness So Baffling?"
- Antonio Damasio: "The Quest to Understand Consciousness"
- Big Think: "Antonio Damasio & Siri Hustvedt"
- Big Think: "Daniel Dennett"
- californica: portrait of the artist as an organism (Jason Tougaw's blog)
- Daniel Dennett: "Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny"
- Emily Singer: "The Measured Life"
- Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Could See Without Eyes
- Gail Hornstein's Bibliography of "First Person Narratives of Madness in English"
- Gail Horstein, "The Hearing Voices Network"
- Gary Wolf on "The Quantified Self"
- Hearing the Voice Project
- Interview with Alva Noë (Salon)
- Jesse Prinz: "Waiting for the Self"
- Jill Bolte Taylor: "My Stroke of Insight"
- Koestenbaum on Viegener
- Maud Casey
- Rufus May: "Living Mindfully with Voices"
- Siri Hustvedt
- Tarnation Trailer
- The Quantified Self
- V.S. Ramachandran: "3 Clues to Understanding Your Brain"
- We Live in Public Trailer
Categories
You’re onto something. Part of what Block does in his review is evaluate Damasio’s argument through the lens of Block’s own definitions of consciousness. We are at a funny historical moment, when many different thinkers have divided consciousness up into categories in order to explain its various origins and functions. They all agree that consciousness is not a single entity or phenomenon, but they don’t necessarily agree about what its components are. The result is a mind-boggling array of terminology.
As we discussed in class, Damasio’s definitions are important to his framework. and maybe Block isn’t relying on them as much as he could (in his review) as insights to Damasio’s points about things on the border between neuroscience and philosophy. As a philosopher, maybe Block is even a bit put off that Damasio is a neuroscientist touching so much upon philosophy? I think Hustvedt’s point in her response that Damasio’s self is multilayered as proto, core, and autobiographical, is an important one. After reading Noe, I’m getting more concerned about everyone’s individual definitions–of self, consciousness, self-consciousness, experience, feeling, mind, and brain, at the least–and how these definitions affect their individual points and arguments, as well as the overall conversation (and our connecting the conversations as readers–especially if approaching these subjects as a novice–between different ideas, theories, and questions). Now that we have read Damasio, Hustvedt, and Noe, I feel like it’s a good time to go back and review their core definitions (individually and vis-a-vis one another) to try and find the similarities and differences (where they overlap and diverge, etc.), as well as to try and pinpoint some of their core questions and answers in hopes of getting a better grasp on things to this point.