Damasio

According to Damasio, both emotions and consciousness are evolutionary adaptations aimed at ensuring an organism’s survival, and both are rooted in the representation of the body. Damasio is careful to organise his semantic territory: There are three stages to the process of emotions beginning with a state of emotion which is an organism’s somatic response to an emotions-inducing object; then proceeding to a state of feeling, which is the organism’s perception of the changes the emotion has manifested in the organism, and; finally, consciousness of the feeling as a feeling. Damasio suggests that emotion is vital to processes of reasoning and decision-making, noting that either too much of it or too little can interfere with our ability to make good decisions. However the combination of feelings and consciousness is for Damasio the key to our success as a species.