Antonio Damasio Quotes

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.

In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.

I am what I feel and think and do.

The physical body is conceived and constructed in consciousness as are time and space. All happens within our self.

You don't really see yourself doing things, of course, but you feel.

We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are 'things' outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not.

I don't think I'm tangible to myself.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint the physical base or location of awareness, it is perhaps the most precious thing concealed within our brains. And it is something that the individual alone can feel and experience. Each of us cherishes it highly, yet it is private.

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.