Core Consciousness - The Hierarchy of Consciousness

The Hierarchy of Consciousness

'As Damasio argues throughout his work, consciousness is far from monolithic', but rather exists in a hierarchy of stages, each building upon (and dependent on) its predecessor(s). Core consciousness forms the middle element in this sequence. 'The essence of core consciousness is "the very thought of you - the very feeling of you - as one individual being involved in the process of knowing of your existence and of the existence of others"'.

Thus 'a sense of being..is what Damasio describes as core consciousness' - what Gerard Manley Hopkins described as 'my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself...which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum...and is incommunicable by any means to another'.

Damasio developed the concept in his (1999) book, The Feeling of What Happens, out of his earlier formulation in Descartes' Error (1994) of the importance of what he called ' background feeling...the feeling of life itself, the sense of being' - something without which, he considered, 'the very core of your representation of self would be broken'.