Opinion | Consciousness Lives in Our Bodies

I think that’s my biggest discovery. As someone who lives in his head most of the time, how important having a body is to being conscious. We really think of the head — we identify with our heads more than our bodies. Maybe because our eyes are there. I don’t know, but consciousness probably arises with feelings first. It starts with things like hunger and itchiness and only later becomes, as it gets filtered into the cortex, becomes the kind of complicated thinking that we pride ourselves on. I think that feelings are based in the body. Finally, it’s how the body talks to the brain. And we have to remember this very simple fact, which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We’re not just a support system for this amazing three pounds of tofu in our heads. There’s no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness is some kind of interplay between both. I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus. I think about things I’m uncertain around in my brain. Exactly, and where do you experience disgust? Like moral disgust. It’s in your belly. You have a great experiment in the book about ginger. People given ginger. – Could you describe that? – Yeah, this is a very cool experiment. They gave people ginger before exposing them to some morally distasteful event or something. Or image. And the people who had the ginger were less disgusted because their stomachs were settled. So our feeling of moral disgust is kind of channeled through our gut, which is such a weird idea. But that’s probably true of a lot of feelings, and that it has enormous implications for this discussion about A.I., whether it can be conscious, because feelings are not just signals, they’re not just bits of information. They contain information. You’re getting a lot of information from a feeling, but that’s the residue of the feeling. There’s something more somatic about it, and it’s very hard to imagine how computers could get to that. And feelings have no weight if you don’t have a vulnerability, if you don’t have the ability to suffer and perhaps be mortal. Otherwise a feeling is just more information. And we know feelings are a lot more than that to us.