A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Frankenstein gives his creation the gift of not only life but also consciousness, and therein lies the rub.[*14] Mary Shelley’s novel chronicles “the creation of a sensitive and rational animal,” and it is the combination of those two qualities that determines the monster’s fate. It offers a plausible explanation for how perceptions and thoughts and feelings enter what William James called “the stream of consciousness,” but it doesn’t explain how this stream acquires a subject that experiences its flow. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Damasio called feelings: Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio, “Homeostatic Feelings and the Biology of Consciousness,” Brain 145, no. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “subtler feelings of existence”: Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio, “Feelings Are the Source of Consciousness,” Neural Computation 35, no.