Does Consciousness Require a Body?

A conversation with a neuroscientist about intelligence, feelings, and robots.

Antonio Damasio has been working to solve the conundrum of consciousness almost since modern neuroscience first began to tackle the problem over three decades ago. In the early 1990s, the Portuguese neuroscientist was among the first to publish research suggesting that feelings such as hunger and pain might provide the foundations for consciousness, that familiar experience of being alive, awake, and self-aware in the world.

Today, Damasio has plenty of scientific company in his empirical approach to consciousness. But among consciousness researchers there are many prominent and conflicting theories of what consciousness is and how it functions, which differ significantly. Damasio belongs to the camp that believes that consciousness requires a body. Other theorists argue that all you need is sophisticated information processing architecture, which could exist without any kind of fleshy home.

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