Core consciousness

In António Damásio's theory of consciousness, core consciousness describes a hypothesized level of awareness facilitated by neural structures of most animals that allows them to be aware of and react to their environment.^[1] In Damásio's theory, core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate a representation of the relationship between the organism (the self) and an environmental stimulus. The process preceding core consciousness is protoself, the one following it is extended consciousness.^[2]

The hierarchy of consciousness

'As Damasio argues throughout his work, consciousness is far from monolithic',^[3] but rather exists in a hierarchy of stages, each building upon (and dependent on) its predecessor(s). Core consciousness forms the middle element in this sequence. 'The essence of core consciousness is "the very thought of you - the very feeling of you - as one individual being involved in the process of knowing of your existence and of the existence of others"'.^[4]

Thus 'a sense of being..is what Damasio describes as core consciousness'^[5] - what Gerald Manley Hopkins memorably described as 'my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself...which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum...and is incommunicable by any means to another'.^[6]

Damasio developed the concept in his (1999) book, The Feeling of What Happens, out of his earlier formulation in Descartes' Error (1994) of the importance of what he called ' background feeling...the feeling of life itself, the sense of being' - something without which, he considered, 'the very core of your representation of self would be broken'.^[7]

Daniel Stern

Main article: Daniel Stern (psychologist)

Daniel Stern's 'phases of the development of the sense of self map neatly into Damasio's (1999) neuropsychological descriptions: the "proto-self" (first-order neural maps), core consciousness (second-order neural maps), and extended consciousness (involving third-order neural maps).^[8]

Where 'the emergent self that Stern describes is conceptualised by Damasio as the "proto-self"...[Stern]'s core self is the product of core consciousness'.^[9]

Physical origins

Damásio theorized that a core self-perception in the human brain arises from structures in the medial or central areas of the brain, including perhaps the superior colliculus, the thalamus and the cingulate cortex.^[1]

See also

• Proprioception
• Stern's tripartite self

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. Vintage, London
2. ^ http://www.drmillslmu.com/evolpsyc/spr2004/lukaszew-pwrpt-03-02-04.ppt
3. ^ Floyd Merrell, Sensing Corporeally (2003) p. 160
4. ^ Damasio, in Merrell, p. 161
5. ^ Marcus West, Feeling, Being, and the Sense of Self (2007) p. 17
6. ^ Quoted in R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Penguin 1969) p. 35
7. ^ Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error (New York 1994) p. 150-1
8. ^ E. S. Person et al eds., The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2005) p. 139
9. ^ Phil Rich, Attachment and Sexual Offending (2005) p. 43