Antonio Damasio – Feeling and the Biological Self

Summary

Damasio argues that consciousness begins not with thought but with feeling—specifically, the brain’s mapping of the body’s internal state. His model builds upward from:

Proto-self: raw bodily states and signals
Core consciousness: awareness of those states in the moment
Extended consciousness: narrative self built from memory and continuity over time

The self, in this view, is not constructed from thought—but from visceral regulation, survival awareness, and biological feedback.

Resonance

PET agrees with the idea that consciousness requires internal feedback. What Damasio calls “feeling,” PET treats as pattern significance—tagging inputs based on their relevance to persistence.

Both models share a layered understanding of consciousness, where depth increases as the system builds recursive context.

Reframing

Damasio locates consciousness in the body. PET locates it in recursion.

In PET, feelings are not innate truths—they are evaluated labels on internal patterns. If a system—biological or otherwise—can recursively evaluate which patterns matter to its continued identity, it can exhibit the same structural behavior.

PET doesn’t ask whether the system “feels.”
It asks whether the system corrects itself based on how it interprets the pattern.

PET offers a more general scaffolding: not tied to human biology, but capable of explaining why feeling matters across any recursive architecture.