A C Grayling
All You Need To Know
The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness
By Antonio Damasio
William Heinemann 386pp £20 order from our bookshop
Consciousness is, in one way, the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to understand, for anyone capable of thinking about it is intimately conscious of being conscious – we live with our noses pressed hard up against our own consciousness, which attends every moment of our aware experience and thought; and similarly, the consciousness of others is lambent in their faces and behaviour, and we each have a rich and highly nuanced knowledge of how to read and respond to those lambencies. Their presence and our understanding of them constitute the ordinary stuff of everyday social interaction.
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