"The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we incessantly anticipate." Antonio Damasio
"The Strange Order of Things"
Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
CONTENTS
BEGINNINGS
PART I, About Life and Its Regulation (HOMEOSTASIS)
PART II, Assembling the Cultural Mind
PART III, The Cultural Mind at Work
"Damasio undertakes nothing less than a reconstruction of the natural history of the universe..."-The New York Times Book Review/2018
On the question of Emotion, "Antonio Damasio argues that the experience of emotion is essentially a higher order representation of the bodily reactions and that this representation can be stable and persistent. As a result of Damasio's work, a consensus is emerging on how emotions are generated." Eric R. Kandel, Winner of the Nobel Prize "In Search of Memory", The Emergence of a New Science of Mind/2006
2022 UPDATE:
Excerpt of Antonio Damasio's "FEELING & KNOWING" Making Minds Conscious BOOK REVIEW by Jim Holt/ January 2, 2022/ The New York Times Book Review:
"Intimately familiar though we are with it, consciousness confronts us with a mystery....Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of "images" that map aspects of the world around us. But these images by themselves, cannot be conscious. For that, they must be related to a
perspective, an "owner," a self - this, after all, is what subjectivity means..." Jim Holt/The New York Times Book Review/January 2, 2022