How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?.

The emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change yo….

Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about….

There are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in ….

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' op….

...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet mome….

Feeling of an emotion is a process that is distinct from having the emotion in the first place. So it helps to understand what is an emotion, what is….

You're not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your healt….

Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that hap….

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason..

We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think..

The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of cult….

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen..

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would….

We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species..

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness,….

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also ch….

There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to wha….

We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the proce….

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an ….

I think it's reasonable to say that even thought, in all likelihood, we have slightly different experiences of reality, they are similar enough to us….