Descartes Error

Antonio Damasio

Although Damasio remains within the conventional paradigm, this classic book, published in 1994, kicks away some of the props of the mechanistic ‘brain as classical computer’ orthodoxy, by arguing for the involvement of the emotions and the body in neural processing. In this respect, the book can be considered to have made more of a contribution than Damasio’s later volume ‘The Feeling of What Happens’, also reviewed in our general section, which left some readers slightly disappointed, partly because of a refusal to distinguish between self consciousness and consciousness as such. [Read more] ...