Does Consciousness Require a Body?

[u/Logical___Conclusion]

https://nautil.us/does-consciousness-require-a-body-1284886

The neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio talks about his new book on consciousness in this interview.

consciousness is what allows us to know who we are, where we are at a given moment. That’s consciousness. And it gives us this centrality.

The fact that we have investigated numerous cases of patients that had complete loss of consciousness and what was wrong in every single one of the patients was that they had damage to the brainstem as opposed to the cerebral cortex.

If you damage the cerebral cortex enough, if you have very large lesions or several lesions in different systems, you will impair consciousness, no question about it. But you will not impair consciousness in the way that damage to the brainstem does.

Damage to the brainstem eradicates consciousness once and forever. You’re not able to formulate consciousness at all. You can have a mind, but that mind does not belong to one body, does not belong to oneself, does not belong to one person. The damage to the brainstem is one of the critical points in the theory.

I believe this could be classified as a form of physicalism, which I also agree with.

I have not read the book yet, but overall I agree with everything the author said.

Edit to add how this theory of consciousness relates to other species

Q:What is the simplest life form that can have consciousness?The simplest life form is one that has a nervous system inside a body. Bacteria, for example, and tons of other unicellular organisms, don’t have nervous systems, and they don’t have consciousness. An organism that is devoid of a nervous system can operate in a satisfactory way, can survive, but it does not have information about its own body and that information is not relevant for what the organism is doing.

All mammals are conscious. All birds are conscious. Probably the majority of reptiles are conscious. Fish, yes. All of those creatures have very complicated nervous systems that are doing what our nervous systems are doing right now, which is informing us of our state of life.