The Feeling of What Happens
"In this book, neuroscientist and humanist Antonio R. Damasio brings a lifetime of research and a literary gift to the last frontier of brain research - the mystery of consciousness. How is it that we know that we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? These are the questions he considers in The Feeling of What Happens."--BOOK JACKET.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
14mentions
11people
2010–2025years
86% recommend14% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- “The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them.
[0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
- This and The Feeling of What Happens by Anthony Damasio were very influential for me.
The ideas behind interoception and their connection to emotion and thought helped me put start taking this space more seriously.
Many people will also cite "The Body Keeps the Score", which is really focused on trauma and therapy rather than theory.
- The best books I would recommend are;
— The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos
— The Book of Why by Judea Pearl
— What Computers Still Can't Do by Hubert L. Dreyfus
— Society of Mind & The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky
— The Feeling Of What Happens by Antonio Damasio
— Language & Mind by Noam Chomsky
— A great mooc is also, the "Learning From Data" Telecourse from Caltech https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse
- Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's written more on the subject as well.
- Somewhat related is Thomas Metzinger’s The ego tunnel. Metzinger is an applied philosopher, directly examining what is consciousness as can be determined and backed up with neuroscience. I loved Antonio Damasio’s the feeling of what happens, and the ego tunnel is like that on steroids, with years extra work from scientists making progress on teasing out distinctions you didn’t realize were there. There is zero ‘woo woo’, and instead a fascinating set of theories on what exactly consciousness is, why it feels the way it does, what science can tell us now, and what remains unknown. For me it is super fascinating from the point of view of why Vipassana works.
- It's about preparing you for living.
If you're interested in the study of how to communicate about these things, phenomenology is a strong starting point (Dermot Moran's Intro. to Phenomenology is kinda dense unless you've studied much philosophy, but I like it.)
If you're interested maybe in a somewhat less philosophically oriented text, The Feeling of What Happens (Antonio Damasio) is a phenomenal take grounded in neurobiology.
