Narrative Self Cafe v23: Being Conscious (Of) – How Affect Aligns Humanity With AI

Review and Interpretation of Antonio Damasio‘s Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

Originally written (but not accepted) for the Astral Codex Ten 2026 Book Review Contest

By Ernest Prabhakar

I have always been fascinated and frustrated by philosophy. On the one hand, philosophers take on the biggest and most important questions humanity ever wrestled with: God, virtue, being, identity, politics, language… and consciousness.

On the other hand, it is not obvious that they have made any meaningful progress.

Alter Ego: That’s unfair. Philosophy created the conceptual infrastructure for modern civilization, and the habits of mind underlying science, democracy, and pretty much every kind of innovation we take for granted. As Keynes is often paraphrased, “We all think the thoughts of dead philosophers.”

That’s fair. We owe philosophy a huge debt of gratitude. And yet… I agree with Robert Pirsig (best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) that most of what we call philosophy is really “philosophology” — like musicology versus music, it seems more interested in arguing about what people meant than actually creating useful meaning.

Alter: You have a point — but then again, you are using a philosopher to make your point. On the other hand, that reinforces your claim that much of philosophy is just arguing with itself, so I will allow it.

Thank you.

Nowhere do I find this contradiction more painful than in the study of consciousness. Subjective consciousness is arguably the ONLY thing we ever experience, yet philosophers — and laypeople — seem split whether it is some ineffable property decoupled from matter, or an illusion that doesn’t actually do anything at all.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on the philosophers. After all, the only data they have to work with are first-person accounts from humans. We have no information about what thoughts — if any! — flit through the heads of dogs and dolphins, never mind carp and cockroaches. Neuroscience has done amazing work on understanding perception and memory, but sadly has done nothing to illuminate the mystery of consciousness. Right?

Wrong.

I. Encountering Damasio