ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Notes
1
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (NY: Norton, 1976), Book 11, Chapter IV,
557. I would like to extend my thanks to the editors of the journal for their helpful comments
on earlier versions of the manuscript.
2
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love,
and the Meaning of Life (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 31-43.
3
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State
UP, 2006).
4
Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (NY: Cambridge UP,
2011).
5
See, inter alia, Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User’s Guide (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002),
197-239.
6
A point most prominently made by Antonio Damasio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason,
and the Human Brain (NY: G.P. Putnam, 1994).
7
Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, CO:
Roberts and Co, 2004).
8
E.g. Susan J Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004); Koch,
Quest; Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (NY:
Scribner, 1994); David John Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental
Theory (NY: Oxford UP, 1996); Gerald M. Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and
Human Knowledge (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006); Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky:
The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004); John R. Searle, The
Mystery of Consciousness (NY: New York Review of Books, 1997); Zeman, Consciousness;
Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our
Insatiable Search for Meaning (NY: Basic Books, 2012); Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from
the Brain to the Soul (NY: Pantheon, 2012).
9
Despite the territoriality of some of the discussion, many of the approaches dovetail, or at
least are not mutually exclusive. Overviews of many of the main approaches are collected in
The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007), 223-484.
10
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness (NY: Harcourt, 2000), 169.
11
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 170.
12
Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (NY: Pantheon
Books, 2010), 204.
13
The process can work in the reverse direction as memories can be slightly rewritten every
time they are accessed and then “reconsolidated”: Joseph E LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our
Brains Become Who We Are (NY: Penguin Books, 2003), 161-62.
14
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 222.
15
There is nothing specifically new about this general idea – indeed it is central to several
forms of therapy, including narrative therapy – but most approaches to this idea posit memory
as the system by which we are changed. While that is certainly the case, consciousness allows
for a broader influence on the self. See Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “The Forager Oral
Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility,” Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychology 2
(2011), 1-19 (10) and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?
Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts.” SubStance 30 (2001): 627.
16
Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 293.
17
Damasio delves into the neurology behind his theory, but it need not detain us here. It should
be noted, however, that the self is distributed across multiple parts of the brain. The self does
not reside in a single place; there is no homunculus.
19