The missing ingredient of AI consciousness

In his book The Feeling of What Happens , Antonio Damasio offers a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Things happen to every object, but consciousness, he argues, emerges when there is an acknowledgement that it is to me that these things are happening. In this framework, consciousness is the recognition that there is a you, that things are happening to you, and that, because of this, you have changed. Specifically, Damasio states that “consciousness is the part of mind concerned with the apparent sense of self and knowing” ( Damasio, 1999 , p. 27). Importantly, this framework distinguishes feeling from knowing. Feelings and emotions emerged as regulatory states to help animals fulfill their evolutionary goals, but before consciousness, the owner of these emotions was oblivious to them. Consciousness arises as the feeling of a feeling, that is, being aware of one’s feelings. In summary, Damasio’s model of consciousness begins with a proto-self: an interconnected coherent collection of neural patterns that represent the state of the organism, moment by moment. The proto-self is the foundation for the core self, a second-order account that occurs whenever an object modifies the